The Amish Blacksmith

by Mindy Starns Clark

  I shook my head, completely at a loss. When had this suddenly become about me? “No, I just—”

  She turned away and resumed walking toward the happy sounds ahead of us.

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s what I thought.”

  THIRTEEN

  Priscilla found a way to quietly blend in with the crowd when she and I returned from our strange conversation at the pasture rail, planting herself within a clutch of younger teens who welcomed her into their conversation. I rejoined Amanda and her little gang, which at the moment included Matthew. I had no doubt that in Amanda’s mind tonight had not been a matchmaking failure so much as step one in a multiphase matchmaking plan. When she set her sights on something, she could be incredibly tenacious. From what I could tell, she’d decided to throw in the towel for now, but that didn’t mean her little scheme was over. Far from it. In fact, I had a feeling it had barely begun.

  That’s why I decided it might be a good idea for me to try and get to know Matthew a little bit better myself. Amanda was a good judge of character, but it never hurt to get another perspective. Besides, it was going to take a very special sort of person to break through the walls Priscilla had erected. I might as well see if Matthew had what it took—or if I should advise my girlfriend to throw this particular fish back into the pond and rebait the hook.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t make much progress in my quest. Being rather shy, Matthew wasn’t the easiest guy to get to know even under the best of circumstances. But tonight was noisy and chaotic with numerous interruptions, so after a few minutes of asking about his family’s feed and tack store, and talking about the weather, I finally gave up. I was feeling too distracted now anyway.

  I spent the rest of the evening hovering near Amanda but thinking about Priscilla. I just couldn’t understand how she had come to such an odd conclusion about me, that I didn’t allow myself to feel things very deeply.

  Where had that come from?

  Had she not noticed I was courting a girl I was nuts about? That I had the job of my dreams and a promising future as a blacksmith in my own right? That word was spreading about my services as a gentler of troubled horses? That I had a loving and supportive family who had always been there for me? Wasn’t it obvious God had given me a wonderful life and I had much to thank Him for?

  Clearly, she didn’t know me at all.

  When it was time to go, I looked for Priscilla among the group of girls with whom I had last seen her talking, but I found her instead back at the pasture rail with the horses, waiting for Amanda and me. Big surprise there.

  While I hitched Willow to the wagon, I heard Amanda making small talk with Priscilla, asking if she’d had a good time and other similar questions. Priscilla’s answers were polite and to the point. Yes, she had had a good time. It was nice to see everyone again. Yes, she was glad she came.

  Talk of the event continued in the buggy at first, but the day had been long, and soon the conversation became Amanda’s comments alone. Seeing how tired I was, she insisted I take her home first, even though my intention had been for the two of us to deliver Priscilla to the Kinsingers’ and then loop all the way back to here. Though ordinarily I would have enjoyed some alone time with my girlfriend, especially after being surrounded by other people all night, I really was exhausted. It had been a long day, and I was counting the minutes to my pillow.

  When I dropped Amanda off, I was glad to see that my date and perhaps future wife had washed off the mascara she’d been wearing earlier.

  “Oh, good,” I said, feigning great relief a moment later as I walked Amanda to her door. “You’re back to being you again.” We stopped at the steps to her porch. I touched the soft corner of her eye to clue her in as to what I was talking about.

  She laughed. “It was just for fun. We wanted to feel… pretty.”

  I touched her chin with my finger tip. “You already are pretty. You don’t need all that.”

  She beamed. “Good night, Jake.”

  “See you.”

  I climbed back in the wagon, turned around in the Shetlers’ driveway, and headed for the road as I prepared myself for whatever might come next. Priscilla ran so hot and cold that I didn’t know if she was going to stay silent the rest of the way home or if she would be lighting into me again, recounting even more of my supposed faults. I decided not to say a thing, hoping that would encourage her to keep quiet as well.

  As it turned out, however, once we were on the road again, Priscilla broke our silence with an apology. Actually, she started with a cookie.

  “Pfeffernusse?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Would you like a pfeffernusse? I tucked some in my pocket at the party and forgot all about them until just now.”

  I glanced over to see that she held a paper napkin cupped in her hand, inside of which were nestled three of the tiny white powdery delights. With her delicate fingers, she lifted one of the cookies from the pile and held it toward me. I hesitated, wondering if this were some kind of peace offering. Finally, after a brief hesitation, I gave in and accepted the confection from her. Popping it into my mouth, I had to close my eyes for a second, it was that good. A few more of those might make me forget every cruel word she’d uttered.

  “I shouldn’t have said what I did earlier, Jake,” she told me as she looked down at her hands in her lap. “It was mean and uncalled for.”

  For the second time that night she had completely surprised me with just a handful of words. “It’s all right,” I said quickly. “No harm done.”

  “No, it’s not all right. You have been nothing but nice to me since I got here.” She glanced up at me and then looked away again. “I am so sorry.”

  She fell silent with only the clip-clop of the horse’s gait sounding between us. I was tempted to hold my tongue the rest of the ride and let her apology be the end of it. But the truth was, I wanted her to know she had not only been wrong to say what she’d said about me, she’d been wrong even to think it. Just because I didn’t make a big show of emotions didn’t mean I was a lightweight when it came to things that mattered. But how to explain that?

  My first thought went to Tyler and Rachel and today’s realization that they were expecting a baby. That moment had held both positive and negative feelings for me, both envy and happiness. Sure, my envy had not been the roiling, gut-wrenching type. It was more like a typical, mild, sort of sibling-related type. Neither had my happiness been the ecstatic, jump up and down over-the-moon type. It had been the normal, everyday I’m-really-happy-for-you-guys type.

  So maybe that wasn’t the best example.

  I needed something else, but the longer I scrambled around for proof of my emotional depth, the more I came up empty. Staring out at the road ahead, I tried to picture the last time I had been thoroughly angry or sad or happy or excited about anything. But the truth was, I simply wasn’t a man of extremes. I never had been.

  “Look, I do feel things. I get angry when I see a horse that’s been mistreated. And I truly love my parents, who are wise and godly and more wonderful than a kid could ever hope for. I almost punched a man once when I saw him get fresh with a girl in town. I nearly cried the day my nephew Tyler joined the church.” I glanced at Priscilla and then back at the road again. “If I have an even keel, it’s because that’s how I am. It’s just my personality.”

  She said nothing in return at first, and when I looked over at her I saw that she was wiping a tear from her eye.

  “You don’t owe me any explanations, Jake. I’m the one in the wrong. I really am sorry.”

  The tenderness of her tone struck me for some reason. I wanted to reach across, squeeze her hand and tell her I very much wanted her to understand who I was. Inside.

  “Please don’t feel so bad about it, Priscilla,” I said instead. “Truly no harm done.”

  I figured we were finished talking about it after that, which is why I was surprised to find myself wanting to say more. I didn’t know if it was the event
s from this evening or the lull of Willow’s steps against the hard pavement or the door this conversation had opened in my heart, but I soon found myself telling Priscilla about the closest I’d come to feeling anything deeply in a while, when I went to the park earlier today and prayed that God would make His will for me known.

  “The other night, at the big family dinner, you told us that the reason you were back here in Pennsylvania was because God made you come.”

  She cracked a smile. “I don’t think I said it exactly that way.”

  “You know what I mean. You talked about God’s will for you as if He had dialed you up and left a message in the phone shanty saying the bus leaves at four. You seemed so sure.”

  “I’m anything but sure, Jake. I don’t know yet why He wanted me here. I thought I had an idea at first, but… ” her voice trailed off for a second. “But that didn’t pan out. At this point, your guess is as good as mine.”

  “I’m not talking about the why; I’m talking about the what. You may not know why He wants you here, but you do know that He does want you here. Right? Does that make sense?”

  “Ya. I see what you mean.”

  “So how did you know? How could you be so certain you were supposed to come here, especially when you didn’t even want to?”

  She shrugged. “You are a man of faith. Are you telling me you’ve never been able to discern the will of God?”

  “No, of course I have. I was absolutely certain of His will when I joined the church. When I went to farrier school too, for that matter. Even when I took the job with your uncle, God’s will was very clear for me.”

  “So what is it you’re asking, then? Obviously, you know how to discern the Lord’s leading.”

  I sighed, wondering how to explain. “Yes, but those things—joining the church and going to school and getting a job—that was all stuff I wanted too. Trust me, it’s not hard to find the will of God when it turns out you’re both on the same page.”

  We shared a smile.

  “But you came here against your own will. You didn’t want to come, and yet you did anyhow—solely because God told you to. I just want to know, how could you be that definite? Do you hear the voice of God in the same, inexplicable way you say you hear horses?”

  “I don’t know how to explain it,” she said thoughtfully. “I’ve always had the feeling that I would have to come back here eventually. But somehow, in the past few months, the weight of that feeling began to grow more heavily on me. In my prayer time, in my Bible readings, in my quiet moments. I don’t know how I knew. I just knew. And for that reason I couldn’t say no, even though I very much wanted to.”

  I nodded, considering her words. I wanted to bring up the part about the marriage proposal from the man with the eight kids, but I didn’t. How that fit into this picture along with everything else was Priscilla’s business, not mine.

  “So you still haven’t figured out yet why God wanted you to come?”

  She shrugged. “Everything was such a mess back when I left six years ago—I was such a mess—so I’ve always expected that at some point I would need to return here and finish whatever it was I had left undone by going away in the first place. That’s my best guess at this point, anyway. That there’s something here left undone that I still need to do.”

  I let her words sit there between us for a long moment.

  “Undone?” I said gently. “Like what?”

  She sighed, clasping her hands in her lap. “I’m not sure. There are just so many ‘if only’s, you know? Maybe they need to be revisited from a more mature perspective.”

  I held my tongue, not quite certain what she meant but willing her to continue.

  “And there are other things too. I’ve never seen my mother’s grave. Never gone to the cemetery, never brought flowers. Never really said goodbye to her.”

  “Except for the funeral.”

  She gazed straight ahead, though whatever she was seeing was far in the past. “No, not even then. I couldn’t go to the cemetery that day. Amos and Roseanna forced me to be there for the part that was done at the house. I had no choice. But when it was time to leave and head over to the graveyard, I simply couldn’t do it. I got all worked up, screaming and crying and everything, so they finally gave in and let me be. They left without me. It never came up again.”

  As she said this, the Kinsinger drive came into view. Almost reluctantly, I turned onto the gravel.

  “I could take you there sometime,” I said as we came alongside the barn and I pulled Willow to a stop.

  “Excuse me?” She paused with one hand on the dash rail.

  “To the cemetery. Where your mother is buried. I could take you if you want.”

  She seemed to consider my words for a second and then turned her gaze toward me, the violet of her eyes reflecting the moon above like gems sparkling in the night.

  “Ich eschtimere sell,” she said softly. I’d appreciate that.

  FOURTEEN

  The next morning I was up before the sun so I could prepare the second stall on my side of the barn for Natasha’s horse. Owen and I had a full day ahead in the blacksmith shop; Mondays were usually that way. I wouldn’t have another long stretch of minutes except for these before dawn.

  After getting dressed and downing a quick cup of coffee from my French press, I went out into the damp, dewy darkness to the horse barns. Once inside, I remembered to take off my hat, and then I turned on the battery-powered shop light and greeted Willow with a scratch behind her ears. I gave breakfast and fresh water to her and to Patch, and then I mucked out both stalls and replaced the soiled straw with fresh while they were eating. With both of them taken care of, I set to work on the third, empty stall, the one where I would be putting January. I replaced the straw bedding, filled the trough with water, and even swept away the webs from the eaves. Patch was busy munching fresh hay, but Willow watched me with casual interest.

  “I’m bringing in a new girl,” I said to her, “and I want you to be nice to her, okay?”

  She chuffed a response that sounded a lot as though she thought I was joking.

  “I’m serious now. I want you on your best behavior. You too, Patch. Don’t you be a bad influence on her.”

  Hearing the sound of my own voice in my ears, it suddenly struck me that I was no better than Priscilla. Talk about being an influence—that girl had me talking to animals the way she did.

  When I was finished, I stood back to make sure the stall for January looked as nice as I could make it, considering the standards Natasha was used to. The result wasn’t close to mirroring the Morningstar stables, but it was the best I could do. My stalls were small and rustic, but at least they were clean.

  After that, I headed over to the Kinsinger side to take care of the other horses. When I got there and switched on the shop light, my breath stilled for a second. Voyager’s stall was empty. My first thought was that he’d busted the hinges off his gate while we all slept and had run away. I quickened my steps to check that out and was reassured to see that nothing was amiss. That’s when I realized his halter and lead rope were gone. The gate had been unlatched, not busted apart. Voyager had been led out.

  I spun around, as if I expected the horse and whoever had taken him to be standing behind me. But, of course, except for the other animals, I was alone.

  My mind raced. Had Priscilla run off in the middle of the night? It sounded silly, especially at her age, but why else would someone take out a horse under cover of darkness?

  I strode from the stables, pausing in the driveway to look up at the main house. There was a single light on in Amos and Roseanna’s upstairs bedroom, so I headed that way, intending to alert them to the situation. I was nearly to the flagstone path that led to the porch steps when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. Turning that way, I spotted two figures far off to my left, slowly headed in my general direction. One was a horse, the other a woman, and they were luminescent in the fading, silvery moonlight.


  Voyager and Priscilla, no doubt.

  They walked at a lullaby speed as though they hadn’t a care in the world. As their slow pace brought them closer, I confirmed that it was indeed Priscilla—and that she wore nothing but a nightgown with a light sweater over it. Voyager’s lead, dangling from his halter, was dragging on the ground. Priscilla stopped for a moment and Voyager, after taking a few forward steps, stopped as well to look back at her. Priscilla stepped up to where the horse was, and the two of them just stood there. As she stroked his long neck, I could see that her hair was down and braided loose along her left shoulder. She pulled something from the pocket of her sweater and offered it to her horse. Voyager took it and chewed as Priscilla leaned into his neck.

  She was clearly not expecting anyone to see her out here, not with her hair down like that and in her nightclothes. I was suddenly wishing I had stayed in the barn and not gone marching off to talk to Amos. It seemed a private moment between Priscilla and her horse—one that quickly grew even more private when she lifted her head toward the house that was now Owen and Treva’s place, the very house she used to live in with her parents.

  The house where both of her parents had died.

  As I waited for the chance to sneak back to the barn unnoticed, Priscilla folded her arms across her chest and just stayed there, staring at the house. Voyager, availing himself of the pause in their walking, dropped his head to the grass and began to munch. They remained like that for a long time, silhouettes in the predawn glow, and I had no choice but to stay where I was too, watching them. This was starting to become a habit, Priscilla communing with horses and me ending up witness to it through no fault of my own.

  The last time it happened, she’d been with Patch in the small stable and I had simply ducked back out unseen. This time, however, it wouldn’t be nearly so easy to disappear unobserved. We were both outside, the morning light slowly starting to dawn. She hadn’t noticed me yet, but I knew if I moved at all, she surely would.

  Of course, I could have pretended not to see her, turned around, and walked back to the barn. Then, at least, she wouldn’t have to be embarrassed because she would assume I was oblivious to her presence. But I didn’t want to do that. It was almost as if I owed her this moment. If she was in prayer—and I had a feeling that maybe she was—the prayer would end the second I took a step, her quiet reverie broken.