The Amish Blacksmith (24 page)

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IFTEEN

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or 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 to 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.

It didn't work. In the end, Priscilla simply lay in bed in the main house until it came time for the funeral. That was when Amos finally put his foot down, insisting that she rise from her grief and attend.

“I wasn't trying to be cruel,” he told me now, as if he still felt bad about it, “but I knew she needed to do this. Funerals serve a purpose, you know? They remind us that it is God who holds life and death in His hands. They allow us to say goodbye.”

According to Amos, Priscilla managed to make it through the hour-and-a-half service in a daze, but when it came time to head to the cemetery, she completely fell apart. There would only be a brief word said graveside, but she refused to go. At that point, the Kinsingers simply allowed her to stay home.

When they returned, they found her not back in bed in the main house as expected, but instead on her knees in front of her own home, her hair unbound and no
kapp
on her head. Amos stopped the buggy and they both climbed down. As he stood respectfully a few steps away, Roseanna knelt beside her niece and put an arm around her.

“That's when Priscilla said it the first time,” Amos told me. We had finished with the animals and were standing just inside the barn, our gaze on what was now Owen and Treva's house but had once been the home of Daniel, Sharon, and Priscilla.

“Said it?” I echoed.

Amos shook his head. “That she killed her mother.”

We both fell silent for a few moments. From where I was standing, I could see the place where Priscilla must have knelt and spoken those words.

“Roseanna told her not to think that way. It wasn't her fault. She told her
that we live in a world where accidents happen. God called her mother home. But Priscilla wouldn't hear her. She just kept saying it was her fault, over and over. Roseanna told Priscilla she couldn't blame herself for being in the barn when her mother fell, no more than Roseanna could blame herself for being upstairs in the bedroom and not outside where she might have heard Sharon calling for help. But everything Roseanna said seemed to fall on deaf ears.”

Amos exhaled heavily. “Then I stepped in, asking Priscilla why she insisted on blaming herself, but she would only shake her head and say that she should have been up in her room when her mother came for her, or she should have heard her calling for her from the barn. And that was that.”

I nodded, trying to follow the logic of her claims. If Priscilla had been in her room, as her mother obviously thought she had, then the chain of events would have played out differently. Priscilla would have simply come down with Sharon, helped her bind the wound, and then gotten her to the hospital in Lancaster.

Barring that, had Priscilla been elsewhere but heard her mother's cries for help, she could have come running sooner, helped her bind the wound, and then gotten her to the hospital in Lancaster. Either way, the worst that would have happened was that Sharon would have had some stitches and a scar.

Instead, Sharon's cries—if there had even been any, which no one could ever know for sure—went unheeded. And without anyone aware of what was happening, she had lain at the bottom of the stairs and slowly bled to death.

“What happened after all that?” I asked, needing to know but not wanting to hear.

Amos slid his hands in his pockets as his shoulders drooped. “We had a rough couple of months of it, with Priscilla withdrawing into herself and her grief and her guilt more and more. We tried to love her and reassure her and pray for her and talk with her, but nothing seemed to make any difference. At fourteen, she should have been spiritually mature enough to understand that such a stance went against everything we know to be true about God. Sharon's death was His will, and Priscilla's refusal to accept that was an affront to His plan and a rejection of His sovereignty.”