The Amish Blacksmith

by Mindy Starns Clark

  I rose to my feet too and walked over to where she stood. “See what?”

  “I’m not the horse,” she said, stroking Voyager. Then she turned to me. “You are.”

  I suddenly wanted to get back on our mounts and return to the real world. We’d been down memory lane a little too long, obviously. Priscilla was freaking me out. “What was that?” I said, though I had most definitely heard her.

  “You’re the horse, Jake. I’m not the one locked up inside. It’s you.”

  I could only stare at her, dumbfounded. I was no horse.

  The look of clarity on her face was again intensifying. It was as if she had struck gold. “All along, since the first day I got here and saw you in the driveway, I had a feeling my coming had something to do with you. But the longer I stayed, the more I told myself it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with you, so I thought maybe instead God wanted to assure me I’d finally come to terms with what happened here, even though I was pretty sure I had. But I finally get it now. It was never about me. It was for you that I came back, Jake. Not for me. For you. To help you see this very thing.”

  “See what very thing? You’re not making any sense.”

  Priscilla looked into my eyes. “First, you need to understand something.” She took a deep breath as she seemed to be sorting her thoughts. “You already know about the feelings I had for you when I was young, long before I left Lancaster County, long before I met Connor.”

  I nodded. We’d talked about her girlhood crush the day we went to the cemetery.

  “Anyway, you were older and so handsome and popular, and deep down I knew you would never be interested in me. But I hung onto the dream of you regardless, because it was the one good thing I could think about. At that time in my life, I had only a few possessions that seemed truly mine. I had my father’s horse, the birch grove, moonlight, and my imagination. And I guess I decided those few things were enough. Until I met Connor the summer my mother died. He was actually a welcome distraction from my attraction to you. I can see now how my heart was looking for a way out of being in love with a dream.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, feeling guilty for having underestimated the depth of her feelings for me all those years ago. What I had called a crush was actually a very young but very real kind of love.

  “Don’t be sorry. I’m not bringing this up now to make you feel bad. I bring it up because I need you to understand that I’ve been studying you for a long time, Jake. I know you.”

  “Um, well, not exactly, Priscilla,” I said, not so eager to switch the focus of the conversation to me. “You’ve been gone for six years.”

  “But that’s just it,” she said, reaching out to touch my arm. “I have been gone six years. I’ve changed. Yet you’re exactly the same. You still won’t let anyone into the deep places in your heart. You won’t even let yourself in. You don’t drop your guard for anyone.”

  I laughed nervously, wanting very much now to be heading back. She truly was making no sense. “We should probably get going.” I started to move past her to get Willow’s reins, and she reached out her arm to stop me.

  “You see? Even now you won’t allow yourself to consider that I might be right. You run away from anything that goes too deep. You want to run away right now.”

  I eased my arm out of her grasp. “What I want is to get back home. It’s late.”

  Priscilla shook her head. “It’s not even dark yet. You just want to go back because you don’t want to talk about this.”

  “Talk about what, Priscilla? I have no idea what you mean!”

  She nodded, her eyes tight on mine. “I know you don’t.”

  A few seconds of tense silence passed between us. She was waiting for me to ask her. “All right,” I sighed. “What are you getting at? How am I a horse?”

  “Not a horse, Jake. The horse. You told Aunt Roseanna I was like one of those horses that you try to coax into trusting you so that they will mentally move past whatever they’re afraid of. You told her I was all locked up inside, chained to the past and unable to forgive myself and move on. That I was that kind of horse.”

  I felt heat rise to my cheeks. I had not known Priscilla had heard what I’d said to Roseanna the last day I’d been working with Patch. “I hadn’t meant for you to hear that,” I murmured.

  “I know you didn’t. But I’m glad I did, so that I can tell you this. You’re the one locked up inside, Jake. It’s you, not me.”

  I laughed, but I was starting to get perturbed. “Right. And how do you figure?”

  “I’ve already told you. You refuse to listen.”

  “Told me what?” I said, sensing anger in my voice.

  “You run away from anything truly deep and meaningful and powerful. You don’t have lingering regrets or achingly beautiful memories because you don’t want to hold on to anything that cuts you to the heart, good or bad. You work with these horses to get them to move past their fears and hang-ups, but you never stop to consider why they are afraid or sad or angry. You only want them to stop feeling anything at all so that they’ll simply eat, sleep, and pull a buggy.”

  “That’s not true,” I began, but she cut me off.

  “It is true. You didn’t care what had happened to January to upset her; you just wanted that horse to forget it. Forget it all. That’s why you flashed bags at her and made noises and all that other nonsense. You told me yourself that the horse needed to learn to ignore all external stimuli in order to behave. The reason why she was afraid didn’t matter to you, only that it cease to matter. You want to be numb to everything that the heart might hold dear so that you won’t be hurt when you suddenly find yourself without it.”

  “That’s enough.”

  But she wasn’t finished.

  “You’re very fond of Amanda, but you don’t love her with your entire soul and being and you don’t want to. You don’t want to feel that strongly about anything.”

  “Oh, yeah? You think it was easy to pull back from you last night? To keep from kissing you when every fiber in my being wanted that more than anything?”

  “I—”

  “What do you think made me stop, Priscilla? It was the thought of Amanda, my feelings for her. I couldn’t do that to her.”

  Priscilla sat back for a moment, regarding me. “I doubt it. Don’t you see? I think your pulling away from me last night had a lot less to do with your feelings for Amanda and a lot more to do with your own fears. You pulled away because you couldn’t bear to consider what a kiss like that would really mean. You don’t love her, Jake. Not the way you should.”

  Priscilla had stepped over the line. “And what would you know about loving someone?” I shot back. “You call what you had with that New York boy love? That’s what you call deep and ardent love? That’s the kind of miserable longing you want to hang on to and protect at all costs?”

  I expected her to lash out at me, even storm off perhaps. But she just stood there, absorbing my cutting words like a sponge taking on water. “That is not what I call love,” she answered. “I was infatuated with Connor. It was all about me and what I wanted from him. Deep and abiding love is never like that. I have not thought about Connor in a long time.”

  “You expect me to believe that after that story you just told? Come on, Priscilla. I am not that stupid. We’ve been out here an hour.”

  She grinned slightly, a pitying smile. “Yes, you are that stupid. You think this last hour was so that I could tell you how much I loved Connor and how deeply he hurt me? This wasn’t a story about Connor or even me. Or you. It’s a story about the love my mamm had for me. That I had for my daed. That they had for each other. Mamm’s love for me was sometimes hard because she didn’t want to lose me. Mamm would have laid down her life for me in a heartbeat. Daed, the same. And lest you think I am only speaking of the love parents have for their children, my daed and mamm would have walked through flames to save each other. That is how much they loved each other, even though she lost her s
oul mate when Daed died, and she missed him with a sorrow that some criticized. I don’t want to feel anything less for the person I marry. You shouldn’t want to, either. Christ loved the church with ardor and an aching longing to see her redeemed. You are to have that same love for your beloved. You must have it, Jake, and not just for her, but for every other person and virtue that truly matters to you. Live your life insulated from passion, and you will have lived a life of pretense and shallowness.”

  Words failed me. From somewhere deep inside, a wall I didn’t even know existed seemed to shudder as if the earth beneath my feet was trembling.

  “I keep feeling as though something must have happened to you, Jake, something that made you afraid to give your heart fully to anything. Something happened to you that makes you think marrying Amanda is safe, and easy. Something makes you think that when you feel worry or fear or fervor or even anger, the best thing is to just brush it off or push it away. If so, then you have to figure out what that was.”

  “Nothing happened,” I said, practically tripping over the words in my anxiousness to get them out. I’d had a happy childhood. Great parents. Good friends. A job I loved. Dreams for the future that made a lot of sense. I had no wounds, and I said as much to her.

  “You sound awfully sure. But how do you know?”

  “Because I know!” I exclaimed. “I may not be emotional like you, but that doesn’t mean I have wreckage somewhere inside me I’ve buried.”

  She studied my face, looking for a chink in my armor, or so it seemed to me. “I told you once before that horses were emotional beings, and you laughed at me.”

  I laughed again now, lightly though, because as much as I wanted to ignore it, the shuddering barrier inside of me was still rumbling. “Horses are easily frightened by what they don’t understand, Priscilla. They have a heightened sense of their need to survive. That’s all it is.”

  She cocked her head. “My point exactly.”

  “What? What’s your point?”

  “You, too, are easily frightened by what you don’t understand. And you’ve a heightened sense of your need to survive. You just want to eat, sleep, and pull a buggy. Because that kind of life seems easy and you won’t get hurt. But what kind of life is that, Jake? It’s an empty one. You were created in the image of God Almighty. You were never meant to live a safe and easy life. You were meant to exhaust yourself in loving and serving people with everything you have.”

  The crumbling inside threatened to topple me, split me in two. I willed the shuddering to stop. This was nonsense.

  “You’re wrong, Priscilla,” I said, a second later. “I’m happy with my life, right now and in the past. Nothing happened. And I have no desire to eat, sleep, and just pull a buggy. I have plenty of goals for my life. Being happy doesn’t have to be that complicated. I like where I am headed, how I plan to get there, and who I want to spend it with. I’m sorry, but you’re wrong.”

  Priscilla stared at me for several seconds, and then I saw her eyes fill with tears. She reached up a hand to wipe the shimmering wetness away. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  She pulled herself up onto Voyager. “I have to go home and pack,” she said as she looked down on me, fresh tears rimming her storm-colored eyes.

  Voyager eased past me, and Priscilla tapped her bare feet against him. She leaned forward and the horse took off in a gentle gallop away from the creek, the birch trees, and me.

  This time, her kapp stayed put.

  Priscilla didn’t want the same attention at her farewell that she’d had when she’d arrived a month before. She asked Roseanna not to trouble all the immediate family to come say goodbye, but her aunt wouldn’t have it any other way. All the Kinsinger brothers and sisters, spouses, and children came for breakfast the next day to see her off in the hired car that would take her to the train station in Lancaster. I stayed in the background when everyone came outside to wait for the car. I wasn’t a member of the family and not expected to be in the mix of those hugging her goodbye and wishing her well in Indiana.

  I hung back by the barn, fiddling with tack that didn’t need fiddling with, watching and waiting to see if she would look for me in the huddle of cousins, second cousins, and aunt and uncle. I wanted to assure her that she needn’t worry, that she was wrong about me, but I had slept poorly the night before, and her words to me at the birch trees were still echoing in my head. I doubted I could say I was fine and sound believable.

  My desire to make sure she knew she was mistaken about me was as much for me as it was for her. There was no terrible thing in my past that made me afraid to surrender to deep feelings. She was wrong. I was just an average guy, that’s all. There were plenty of men like me.

  I wasn’t the horse.

  While I spied on the family huddle, Comet saw me standing there, and he came bounding over, calling attention to my presence. Several heads turned my way, including Priscilla’s. She said something to everyone and then she started walking toward me. Stephen called Comet to return to him and the dog happily obeyed.

  Priscilla’s expression turned pensive as she neared me, and I felt an apology from her coming on. I didn’t really want one. Apologies nearly always felt a bit awkward and unnecessary. And she didn’t owe me one. She didn’t owe me anything.

  “Guder Mariye, Jake.”

  I nodded, eager to take control of the conversation. “Morning. All set, then?”

  “Ya. My train leaves Lancaster at eleven.”

  “Is she a nice person, your Great-Aunt Cora?”

  Priscilla smiled at my concern. “She’s quite the character, but in a good way. She’s actually fun to be around and full of stories. I’m sad to hear her health is failing, but I am glad I can help her stay in her own house.”

  “I’m sure it’ll go well.”

  She inhaled, drawing strength from the morning air. “Look, Jake. About yesterday—”

  “You don’t have to apologize, Priscilla. Really.”

  Her eyes widened a bit. “I wasn’t going to. I just wanted to ask you to please, please think about what I said.”

  After some initial surprise, I opened my mouth to protest, but she placed her hand on my arm, gently, the way a mother might. “I know you don’t want to think about what I told you. So I am asking you to. For me. This whole time I’ve been back in Lancaster County, you’ve been the only person I felt connected with at all. That’s why I thought I’d finally figured out why God wanted me to come back here, because you… it just makes me sad to think that you’ll forget everything I said. I don’t want you to. Will you promise me you won’t?”

  “Priscilla, I don’t—”

  Her hand on my arm increased its grip. “Please. Just promise me you will think about it. Pray about it. Ask God to help you see what I see. If you want, ask Him to prove me wrong. Will you do that?”

  From behind us a car pulled onto the gravel driveway.

  “Priscilla!” Amos called.

  “Your car is here,” I murmured, stating the obvious.

  “Promise me.”

  The car stopped in front of the milling family members. The driver got out and popped open the trunk.

  “Promise me!” she said, urgency cloaking her request. The driver placed both her suitcases and a third bag into the trunk and closed it.

  I was a man of my word. I always had been. I would not tell her yes if I did not mean it. And a niggling, itching, piercing sensation within me was prodding me to say yes.

  I thought back to the night of the volleyball party at Chupps’ field when Priscilla promised she would make an effort to get to know people. She did so even when nothing within her wanted to, simply because I asked her. How could I not extend the same courtesy back to her now?

  “All right.”

  The desperation in her countenance lifted immediately. She raised the hand that she had placed on my arm and now pressed it gently to my right cheek in farewell. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  She spun away from me and wa
lked back to her family. She hugged Amos and Roseanna one last time and then got into the car. The driver shut her door and walked around to the other side.

  “Write to us!” Roseanna called out, and from behind the window on the passenger side, Priscilla nodded.

  Stephen held onto Comet as the dog barked a cheerful goodbye. The driver eased the car into a wide circle to turn it around, and then it crunched on the gravel back down to the road.

  Priscilla shifted in her seat to look at me as the car eased onto the street. She pressed her hand to the glass and then she was gone.

  PART THREE

  THIRTY

  In the days and nights following Priscilla’s departure, I did nothing intentional to fulfill my promise to her, yet quite often I found myself pondering her words just the same. Mostly, I couldn’t stop wondering if there really had been, as she claimed, something in my past—some incident—that had rendered me incapable of deep emotion. Whenever I considered the possibility, I vacillated between two uncertainties. First, that there had been such an incident, and second, that there had not.

  The way I saw it, if there really had been an incident, then I was going to have to learn what it was. Not only would that mean I was in for an odd and arduous journey to a place far outside my comfort zone, but once I found out the truth, it might be more than I would want to know.

  If, on the other hand, there hadn’t been any incident after all, then that meant this was just who I was, a guy whose feelings only ran so deep. My life would be one of emptiness and mediocrity, and I would die never having truly felt alive at all—at least, according to Priscilla Kinsinger.

  I didn’t discuss these things with Amanda. Not the challenge Priscilla had given me or my thoughts and feelings about it since. A couple of times I almost broached the topic with her, but then I would remember what Priscilla had said to me in the birch grove, that I didn’t truly love Amanda and, in fact, wasn’t even capable of such love in my present state. I finally decided that until I got my head on straight about this one way or the other, I wouldn’t bring it up with her at all. And though I half expected Amanda to catch on to the fact that there was something I was holding back from her, she never seemed to notice or care. Amanda had been moody since Priscilla left, and in a way I didn’t blame her. It had to be disappointing that despite her massive efforts—including her brilliant plan to match up Priscilla with Matthew—in the end it had all been for nothing.