A Quilt for Jenna (36 page)

Lowell stood in amazement. He'd never heard Reuben show emotion. Now the passion of this outburst had tears forming in Reuben's eyes. Lowell couldn't think of anything to say. Reuben stood up and walked away, wiping the tears from his face while Lowell stared after him.

There's part of it, Lord, but that ain't all. Show me the rest, Lord. Show me what's eatin' that boy so we can get him healed.

In the weeks before Thanksgiving of 1950, Reuben spent most of his free time by himself in the bunkhouse. Lowell sensed he could do nothing for Reuben, so he decided to back off for a while and let Reuben continue to work through it on his own.

But matters came to a head before that would happen. On the night before Thanksgiving, the sound of the barn door creaking open woke Lowell. He got up and went to the window and saw a dim light coming through the cracks between the boards. He grabbed his shotgun, slipped on his boots, and walked quietly out to the barn. He went around to the back and peeked through the window. What he saw shocked him. Reuben had thrown a rope over the main beam in the barn and tied it off. He was standing on a stool with the end of the rope looped around his neck.

As Lowell watched he saw Reuben tense his face and close his eyes. Just as Reuben pushed himself off the stool, Lowell kicked open the back door, raised his shotgun, and blasted the rope where it hung over the beam. Reuben fell in a heap and began to weep uncontrollably.

“Let me die, Lowell,” he cried. “
Please
, just let me die!”

“Get up. Nobody's getting hung on my spread unless they're a murderer or a horse thief.”

“But I am a murderer. I killed my little girl. Please just shoot me and put me out of my misery.”

“Not before you tell me what happened. Let's hear your story, and when it's done, if you deserve it, I'll shoot you where you stand.”

So Reuben began to tell Lowell the whole story—growing up Amish, leaving his faith and joining the Marines, fighting in the trenches, being wounded, and returning to his home and his Amish faith. And then he wept his way through the story of Jerusha and of Jenna's illness and death and of his flight from Apple Creek and the pain and grief of the wife he had left behind.

“I thought if I obeyed the rules of our Order and did everything the
ordnung
said, I'd be safe. I did everything right, and God still let Jenna die. Either He's not real or He's cruel and capricious, and I just can't face either one of those options anymore. I want to die. I deserve to die, Lowell.”

“From where I sit, there are men who deserve death a lot more than you do, yet they still walk this earth. And there are men like my son, who had his whole life ahead of him and died at eighteen in some stinking jungle halfway around the world. Reuben, you're not the one who decides. That's up to God and no one else. And you're wrong—God
is
real and He's
not
cruel or capricious. He didn't kill your little girl; this sin-cursed world did. From what you tell me, it seems your little girl already understood God and His ways, and so her going home means she's with Him.

“As for you killing her, that's just not true. God keeps our lives in His hands, and when it's our time to go, there ain't no one can change that. If you had put a gun to her head and shot her, that would be different, and we'd be on our way to see the sheriff right now. As it stands, you were just trying to do what you thought was best, and it didn't turn out.

“God is trying to show you something in all of this, Reuben. You don't earn points with God by keeping rules. In fact, Jesus pointed out that there are only two rules: Love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself. It appears that you did neither. You didn't love God. You tried to make Him do what you wanted Him to do instead of just serving Him. And you didn't love your closest neighbor, your wife, like you loved yourself, so you bowed to your pain and forgot about hers. If there's anything you're guilty of, its abandoning your wife when she needed you most.”

Reuben looked at Lowell. “I've never really known God, have I?”

“No, son, it seems not,” Lowell said. “But that's easily remedied.”

“How?” asked Reuben.

“Well, boy, you just climb down off your high horse, ask Him to forgive you of your sins, and then ask Him to come and live with you and be the one who makes all the decisions for your life. He said, ‘Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and you shall find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.' You can't do it by yourself, Reuben, you need Him, and you need Him bad. Trust Him with your life. But this time, get to know Him as God, not as a set of rules. Oh, I know the Amish are good folks, but without a relationship with Christ, it doesn't matter how many rules you make up, you can never keep them. You need Christ living in you. Like Jesus said to Nicodemus, ‘You must be born again.'”

And so Reuben prayed with Lowell, and as he did, he began to find the peace he had been seeking all his life. He began to understand the depth of his wife's pain and his failure to care for her in her deepest need.

“Jerusha has been alone with no one to help her,” Reuben said quietly. “What should I do?”

“Well, son, I think it's time that you get back into that old Ford and point it east.”

And so on Thanksgiving Day, November 23, 1950, a year after his daughter's death, Reuben climbed into his truck, waved goodbye to Lowell and Manuel, and headed for Ohio. The truck hummed beneath his feet, and his thoughts turned to Apple Creek.

If I drive straight through, I can make it home by Sunday...

Dim light came faintly through the window into the room. The first faint hint of Sunday morning woke Jerusha to another day. She had held the little girl close, the two of them wrapped in Jenna's tattered quilt, all through the long night. She checked the little girl's pulse. It was still beating faintly.

Her hope of rescue for them both was fading. Surely if help was coming, it would have come by now. This God she was so angry at only two days ago was once again going to fail to rescue her at her darkest hour. Still, somehow she had worked through the idea that God had failed her. Now it was her own failures that seemed the hardest to bear.

Pride, ambition, anger, faithlessness, fear, selfishness...the things that had slowly but surely drawn Jerusha away from her first love became clear to her, and she cried out to the Lord to forgive her and restore her. And then she prayed for her husband.

“Lord, please bring Reuben home. I need him. I was wrong to treat him the way I did, especially when he needed my love and my forgiveness so much. I do forgive him. If You will bring him back, I will be a good wife to him. I need You, and I need Reuben.”

A scripture came to her from the book of Job: “Though he slay me, I will hope in him.”

“
Ja
, Lord, no matter what happens now I will always love You and praise You for all You have given me.”

And as Jerusha prayed, her beloved
Loblied
came to her lips.

Lässt loben Ihn mit allen unseren Herzen! Weil Er allein würdig ist!

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
-E
IGHT

To Seek and Save the Lost

B
OBBY
H
ALVERSON DROVE SLOWLY
down the county highway toward Apple Creek. It was Sunday morning, and the sun was just coming up. The snow had drifted all along the road, in some places up to thirty feet high. The wind was still blowing at a steady thirty-five miles an hour, but the temperature had risen a few degrees to slightly above zero. A few Ohio National Guard Jeeps followed Bobby's plow, bringing food and medical supplies to folks the storm had isolated.

After three days of searching in vain for Jerusha, Bobby had come to the grim conclusion that Jerusha was no longer alive. She couldn't be
.
No one could survive this storm out in the open. She must have gotten hypothermia, gone into shock, and wandered away from the car.

As the grim thoughts pushed into his mind, the little caravan crept into Apple Creek. Bobby swung out of line and headed toward the Springer home. Maybe she was there by some miracle.

Bobby pulled up in front of the Springer house. He left his tractor running and made his way through the drifts of snow. He clambered up on the porch and stopped there. In the snow leading up to the front door were boot tracks. Whoever had come up on the porch had gone inside and had not come out. Probably just Hank checking the house out again.

Bobby walked along the porch to the window. The tracks led up from the side of the house…and then he saw an old Ford pickup pulled up in the yard.

That truck doesn't belong to anyone I know.

Bobby brushed the snow off the window and looked in. In the dim light he could see a dark figure seated in one of the chairs facing the fireplace. There was a fitful blaze burning on the hearth, and the flickering light cast the figure's shadow on the wall. Bobby went back to the front door, cautiously opened it, and peered in.

“Hello in there,” he said. “What are you doing in this house?”

There was no answer, so Bobby went inside and walked slowly toward the fireplace. He could see that the person in the chair was a man by the breadth of his shoulders. The man had on a long mackinaw and a Western hat, so Bobby couldn't see his face.