The Amish Blacksmith

by Mindy Starns Clark

  So I stood there and attempted a prayer of my own, which was pretty much just a repeated plea for God to arrange it so that I could get back to the stalls unnoticed.

  I don’t know how long she stood staring at the house where her mother had died, but at some point, lights came on inside it. Both of us startled at the silent but noticeable intrusion, and then we startled again when lights came on in the kitchen of the big house as well. Priscilla snapped her head my direction. That was when she saw me, and it was as if I could read her thoughts.

  Time had gotten away from her. She hadn’t meant to stay out that long with her hair down and wearing nothing but a nightgown and sweater. And now Amos and Roseanna were up and in the kitchen, and Owen and Treva were up in their house, and I was standing between her and the horse barn. I saw her glance from the main house to the smaller house and then back to me. She was stuck. Amos and Roseanna would question her about why she had been out, before dawn, in her nightgown. And if Owen and Treva stepped out their kitchen door and saw Priscilla standing there in the grass in her bedclothes, staring at their house, that would be even worse. And then there was the matter of Voyager, who needed to be taken back to his stall.

  I knew what I could do to help her. I started for her, taking long strides. She turned her head this way and that, looking for an escape, but there was none to be found. I was close enough now to see the frustration in her eyes. When she opened her mouth to speak, I quickly laid a finger to my lips. As I neared her, Voyager lifted his head and whinnied, whether in greeting or warning, I couldn’t tell. Priscilla reached back for his lead. When I drew close enough to them to speak to her in a hushed tone, I held out my hand for the rope.

  “I’ll take him back. Go in through the breezeway that leads to Mahlon’s house. That side door is always open. You can head up the stairs in the main house through the laundry room. No one will ever know.”

  When she didn’t answer, I simply took the lead and clicked for Voyager to follow me, which thankfully he did. I didn’t wait for Priscilla to say a word. I just started walking away with her horse. I had taken only a few steps, and I sensed she had not yet moved.

  I turned around. Sure enough, she was still where I had left her, the end of her long loose braid gently lifting on a tiny breeze. “Go on,” I said softly to her. “I have Voyager.”

  This time, after I started walking, I could hear her moving across the grass behind me. When I turned a second time, I saw her, barefoot, hurrying to make her way toward the vegetable gardens and up the stone steps that led to the breezeway, which connected the main house to Mahlon and Beth’s. I turned back and increased our speed, thankful that it had been a cool night and everyone’s windows were closed. I was thankful as well for the strip of grass that ran along the gravel driveway, which deadened the sound of Voyager’s footfalls.

  I had just hung up his lead and halter when Amos stepped into the barn. He seemed surprised to find me in that particular horse’s stall.

  “Jake, I know you probably mean well, but I don’t think Priscilla would appreciate you looking after her horse like that,” he said warily. “You know how she feels. She doesn’t want you or Stephen or me or anyone else dealing with him at all. Only her.”

  “Ya. I know. I just… just wanted to make sure he had fresh water. That’s all.” I walked out of the stall, closed the gate, and let the latch fall into place. Then I turned to Amos to engage him in a conversation so he wouldn’t notice that Voyager’s hooves and ankles were wet from dew.

  “I have that Englisch woman coming today. She’s bringing her horse here,” I said, even though I knew Amos would not have forgotten.

  “Ya. I remember. As long as it doesn’t interfere with your other work I don’t mind.”

  I moved to the first stall, as far from Voyager as I could get, to where Big Sam was stabled, and opened the gate. Amos followed me.

  “How did it go for Priscilla at the young people’s gathering last night? Roseanna and I were already in bed by the time she got home.”

  He waited for my answer with worry in his eyes.

  “I think she had as good a time as anyone should expect of her, Amos. She just got back. She hasn’t seen any of her old friends in six years. I’d say she did pretty well, considering. At least she made an effort.”

  He nodded, taking that in, but concern was still etched in the lines on his face.

  I started in on the first stall, a bit taken aback when he jumped in to help. He usually had his own set of tasks to get to in the mornings before we opened the shops, so his actions surprised me at first. Then I realized he was hovering because he wanted to hear more. There wasn’t much else about last night that I wanted to share with him though, so instead I asked him the question that had been in the back of my mind for a while now, ever since my conversation with Priscilla about God’s will and why He had brought her here. She had made reference to the fact that there were “just so many if only’s,” which I hadn’t really understood at the time. But later it struck me that she must have been talking about guilt. If only I hadn’t done this. If only I hadn’t done that. I felt bad that I hadn’t recognized it before.

  “Amos, do you think Priscilla blames herself for her mother’s death? Sometimes I get that impression.”

  He faltered for a moment, nearly dropping the pitchfork. I was beginning to wish I hadn’t asked the question, especially when he didn’t say anything at first, but then he finally spoke.

  “Why? What did she say?” He looked almost stricken.

  “Um. Well, nothing actually. I just wondered if maybe she does.”

  “She didn’t say anything?”

  I stopped what I was doing and looked at him. “Say anything about what?”

  “About… about what really happened back then?”

  What really happened? Sharon fell down the stairs and died. “I’m not following you.”

  He sighed and leaned on his pitchfork. “I wasn’t going to mention it because I don’t know what the six years away have done for Priscilla. But the fact is, when she left here it was worse than her just blaming herself for her mother’s death. She was saying that she killed her mother.”

  My mouth fell open. That was a little different than feeling responsible. “Really?”

  “Ya. She said it to me and Roseanna right after it happened, so we brought in the bishop, and she said the same thing to him. She said she was the one who killed her mother.”

  “But Sharon fell down a flight of stairs, and Priscilla wasn’t even in the house when it happened, right?”

  Amos nodded. “She was in the barn. That’s why we couldn’t make any sense of what she was saying. The more we told her it wasn’t her fault, the more upset she would get. It was terrible.”

  “Could no one help her see that because she couldn’t hear her mother’s cries for help, that didn’t make her responsible for the woman’s death?”

  I paused in my duties to go to the open doorway and look outside. The night sky had peeled back and a tangerine glow was embracing the horizon. From where I stood, it was easy to see that the house that had been Priscilla’s back then sat closer to where I was standing than any of the others. But “close” was relatively speaking, as it was still a good fifty yards away. How could anyone expect to hear someone calling for them from that great a distance? Moving back inside, I asked that of Amos, who was bent over a tack box, rummaging inside it.

  “You can’t make people see what they don’t want to see, Jake. We tried. She just wouldn’t listen.”

  I remembered the sight of Priscilla in the predawn moonlight this morning, her black hair against her nightgown as she stared at her old home. What had she been thinking about? Did she still see things that way, that she killed her mother? Or had time and maturity taught her that what happened that tragic day had ultimately been the will of God and not due to some action—or inaction—of her own?

  I moved to the first stall and started back in with my work where I’d left off
.

  “Look, Amos. I want to help Priscilla find her place back here, and not just because you asked me to. But I really don’t know what I am dealing with. What else ought I to know?”

  He sighed heavily, as if just the thought of such a conversation was weighing him down. But then, as together he and I fed and watered the rest of the horses, cleaned out their stalls, and tidied up the barn, Amos told me everything he knew.

  FIFTEEN

  For Priscilla, it all really started the day her father died of a heart defect no one was even aware he had,” Amos began. “She had always been so close to him, much more so than with her mother.”

  He went on to say that Daniel seemed to understand Priscilla’s quiet, reserved nature in a way few others did, and that he often tried to help her feel better about herself. He had a beautiful, ebony-hued Saddlebred named Shiloh who was kind of a loner—Shiloh didn’t care to be around other horses, and the only human company he seemed to welcome were Daniel and Priscilla—and Daniel used to say that Shiloh and Priscilla were a lot alike that way.

  “He told her that particular quality was neither good nor bad,” Amos said, “it was just the way God made them. I knew she appreciated hearing that. It made her feel a little less odd, you know?”

  As a child, Amos continued, Priscilla preferred to spend her time outside and in the welding shop with her father and uncle rather than in the house with her mother or with friends. She could play by herself for hours on end, lost in her own imagination. Sadly, though Sharon and Daniel had wanted a large family, they were not blessed with any other children. Though they struggled to accept this as God’s will, it was especially hard for Sharon, who’d had to deal a number of times with the physical and emotional pain of what Amos called “a very special kind of loss,” by which he meant miscarriage.

  Sharon had always dreamed of having a house full of children, and the fact that Priscilla was the only surviving child made her overly protective. She kept her daughter close to the house when she could, fretted over letting her do things that she thought were too dangerous, and didn’t want her spending time with the horses, not even Shiloh, because of the threat of injury. Daniel served as a buffer between them, balancing his wife’s excessively cautious nature with his daughter’s need for freedom. It wasn’t ideal, but they managed to make it work, at least while he was alive.

  Daniel was a devoted husband and caring father, but because of a weak heart valve that none of them knew about, he tired easily and was never a man of great physical strength. He did have an eye for the artistic, however, so he ended up specializing in ornamental welding. That left the heavier and more functional jobs—including the farrier work—to Amos and his growing sons, Mahlon and Owen.

  When Priscilla was ten, Daniel had a massive heart attack one night at the dinner table. There were no warning signs, and there had been no way of saving him. He was dead before help could arrive. Sharon and Priscilla took his death hard, as each lost the one person who seemed to understand her. After her father’s death, Priscilla retreated further into her shell, distancing herself from every other girl her age and preferring to spend all her time with Shiloh. Sharon seemed adrift on a sea with no purpose other than raising Priscilla. Amos and Roseanna could see that Daniel had been the cushion between Priscilla and Sharon. With him gone, Sharon’s hypervigilance was exasperating to Priscilla, just as much as Priscilla’s moodiness was frustrating to Sharon.

  In the middle of this tough time of transition, Amos’s father died. He and his wife had been living in the daadihaus at the time, but after he passed away, his mother didn’t want to live there alone. Her younger, widowed sister had a home in Gap, so she moved there instead, leaving the daadihaus empty.

  Meanwhile, Amos knew that it was up to him to see that Sharon and Priscilla were taken care of in the wake of his brother’s death. They would still need some kind of income, however, so once the daadihaus was empty, Amos proposed that they turn it into a guest cottage instead, one Sharon could manage. Amish bed-and-breakfast-type establishments were slowly becoming sought-after accommodations as tourists began to grow more and more interested in the Amish lifestyle. All the proceeds would be hers, Amos said, and she could run it however she wished. Sharon slowly warmed up to the idea, though she took several months to think about it before she agreed.

  Finally, a year after Daniel’s death, the guest cottage was ready for its first paying customers. Fliers were put up in visitors’ centers. Colorful postcards were displayed at various retailers, including the quilt shop where Roseanna worked. Friends at the tourist bureau helped get it listed on the Internet and in several reliable guidebooks. As Sharon was an excellent cook and competent housekeeper, word got around—both locally and through online reviews—that the guest cottage at the Kinsinger place was a great option for tourists looking to stay at an authentic Amish homestead in Lancaster County. Noting Priscilla’s keen interest in animals, Roseanna had suggested that she put together a petting zoo for the children of the families that stayed at the cottage. According to Amos, a smaller barn used to sit between Sharon’s house and the guest cottage, so that’s where they ended up putting the little zoo.

  Priscilla, usually not one to show much outward emotion, had been exuberant about the idea. In short order two goats, a miniature pony, a yearling lamb, several chickens, and two rabbits had been installed in the part of the barn that Shiloh didn’t occupy. Priscilla was in charge of keeping the animals and showing them to guests who wanted to see them.

  For the first time in a year, it seemed that both Priscilla and Sharon had a measure of happiness. The guest cottage was booked nearly every weekend, even in the colder months, and there was a waiting list for the warmer months both weekends and weekdays, as well as during fall foliage. Amos and Roseanna hadn’t minded too much the intrusion of tourists onto the homestead. For the most part, visitors respected the family’s privacy and stayed near the cottage and barn. And it was clear that Sharon was enjoying making her own income and having something to occupy her day. Priscilla didn’t cease to be a reserved person with the running of the petting zoo, but she seemed to miss her father less and didn’t butt heads with her mother nearly as much.

  At the end of the summer of Priscilla’s fourteenth year, however, a crushing end came to this newfound and hard-won contentment.

  It was early September, and Sharon had just picked a batch of acorn squash she was preparing to roast for canning. She also had guests in the cottage, a college professor and her teenage son who were spending the last four weeks of the summer before heading back to Long Island and school. The cottage guests, however, were not on the premises that autumn afternoon when Sharon, struggling to cut open an obstinate squash, accidentally slit her hand and wrist, slicing through a major artery. I couldn’t imagine how someone could end up with an injury that bad just from a slip of the knife, but Amos reminded me how solid and hard acorn squash can be, not to mention how sharp the knives are an Amish woman uses when preparing vegetables for canning.

  He continued on with his tale from there, and though I had already heard much of this part from Amanda, his version filled in some blanks. I asked about the actual cause of death, technically speaking, and he said that from the amount of contusions on Sharon’s head and back, the county coroner determined that she died from multiple injuries, including blood loss and trauma to the head after striking it repeatedly as she fell the length of the stairs. How long she lay at the bottom of the staircase, or if she was conscious the entire time, or even if she cried out, was anyone’s guess.

  When he got to the part where Roseanna first discovered what had happened, Amos choked up for a moment. I wasn’t sure if his tears were for the needless pain and suffering of his sister-in-law or for the shock and grief such a grisly sight had caused his wife. Probably both.

  Amos said that as soon as the discovery was made, Roseanna dashed out of the house, screaming for help. Priscilla, who had been in the barn with Shiloh, was the first t
o come running. When she got there, Roseanna sent her on to the welding shop to get Amos and have someone call 911. By the time Priscilla returned to her mother, Sharon had already lost consciousness. She never regained it again.

  Her breathing was ragged and shallow, and her skin deathly pale, when the ambulance whisked her away to the hospital in Lancaster, Priscilla riding along up front. Amos and Roseanna got there by hired car an hour later, but by then Sharon had already been pronounced dead.

  Priscilla was inconsolable. Back at home later that night, they moved her from the smaller house up to a spare bedroom in the main house. There she cried and slept to the exclusion of everything else for the next twenty-four hours. A day later, when Sharon’s embalmed body was delivered to the house by the mortician, Priscilla refused to see it or even go anywhere near it, even after Roseanna and some of the other women had finished dressing Sharon in her burial clothes.

  As always following a death in the Amish community, the casket was placed in the main room, and Amos and Roseanna’s home soon filled with people, not just the friends and relatives who had come to pay their respects, but also those who were there to take over the Kinsingers’ housework and farmwork so that they would be unencumbered by the daily routine during this period of visitation and mourning. And though Priscilla had gone by then from a state of near hysteria to one of numbed shock, no one could convince her to come downstairs to view her mother’s body one last time.

  At the end of the second day, they knew something had to be done. So the next morning, before the house began to fill up with people again, Amos and Roseanna rounded up several close relatives and friends to talk to her, hoping one of them might make more headway than they had.