The Amish Blacksmith (38 page)

The creek meandered across the county, branching off here and there and changing names from mile to mile. Here, where the water was at its widest, was known as Blue Rock Creek.

As we slowed our horses to a walk, we led them closer to the banks. The creek below us was a good thirty feet across and deep enough to go wading, although I was glad no one was enjoying the cool of the day here. Trees of various types lined either side of the creek, and reeds and cattails had sprung up in the marshy patches where the water was the stillest. Dragonflies darted about, and a pair of wood ducks quacked their annoyance at our intrusion. The sun behind us had dipped low in the sky, casting golden light on the pastoral scene. The trail was just barely wide enough for me to bring Willow alongside Voyager.

“You lost your hat,” Priscilla said, turning her head to look at me.

The pins in her hair had loosened, and her
kapp
straggled across her back like a downed sail.

“You barely held onto yours,” I returned.

I expected her to realize then that her hair had practically fallen around her shoulders and to reach back for her
kapp
and hastily replace it on her head, but that's not what she did. She just let it continue to hang by its strings, which remained tied at her neck. And as for her hair, she merely swept away a dark long lock that framed her face.

“You can probably find it on the way back,” she said.

We continued to walk our horses at a gentle pace along the top of the bank so they could cool down.

“There's a place up ahead in the birch grove where they can drink,” Priscilla offered.

“You've been here before,” I said, partly in jest. It was obvious she had been here before. Lots of times.

“I used to come here with my
daed
. We'd ride here on Shiloh. He'd put me
in front and hang on to me with one arm and guide his horse with the other.
Mamm
never knew
Daed
let Shiloh gallop here. She thought we walked him.”

I looked at her face, wrapped in the memory of a wonderful time in her life. She seemed serene, though, not pained. I said nothing. I just wanted her to continue.

“And I came here a lot after he died, which unfortunately
Mamm
did know about. She didn't like it. She was sure I would get hurt, that Shiloh would throw me or I'd fall off or I'd drown in the creek or I'd get struck by lightning or the earth would simply open up and swallow me whole.”

I waited.

“And she was pressured by other people to tell me it wasn't right that I was riding a horse like that, like a boy, like a rebel. A respectable Amish girl didn't ride a horse. Certainly not like that. And not bareback.”

She looked out over the landscape and was quiet for a moment. The creek here had become more of a brook. It moved below us and past us with speed, bubbling over boulders and stones as though there was somewhere it needed to be.

“I was forbidden to come here, at least by horse,” she said, and she turned away from the water to stare at the trail ahead and the copse of trees we walked toward. “I tried to obey, but sometimes I just couldn't. On full moons, when there was light enough to see, I would come here. I knew it wasn't right, but I thought I'd go mad if I didn't.
Mamm
was so protective of me all the time. I was suffocating in that house. I didn't have friends to talk to, and I felt so alone.”

“Amanda tried to be your friend then,” I said gently, after a moment's pause.

Priscilla shook her head. “You've told me that before.”

“Are you saying she didn't?”

“I don't mean to insult your girlfriend or anything, but she and the other girls thought I was weird. I know they did. And they were right. I wasn't like them. And I guess if that's what weird is, that's what I was. I didn't like their gossip and their little games and the way they talked about boys—and yes, Jake, they started noticing boys at ten—or the way they thought of everything as a game. They seemed so superficial.”

She turned to face me. “I'm sorry to say that. I am. But it was how they seemed to me. They… they still seem that way.”

Words to defend Amanda were about to fall off my tongue, but Priscilla filled in the momentary silence before I could say it wasn't true.

“I shouldn't have said that. I'm sorry. I am the weird one. Forget I said that. Please?”

I could only nod my head as it dawned on me that maybe she was right about Amanda. About a lot of things.

“I didn't bring you here to talk about that,” she said.

At that moment I suddenly realized Priscilla had every right to go back to Indiana. There was only lingering nothingness here for her.

“You don't have to tell me anything.”

“No. I want to. I think maybe… I'm supposed to.”

We entered the copse of trees. She slid off her horse and so did I. The bank of the creek was level here and a perfect little jetty had formed for an animal to get a drink. We led Voyager and Willow to the water's edge and they lowered their heads. We looped their leads onto a low-lying branch.

Priscilla pointed to a log a few feet away that had been rolled into place by long-ago hands. Her father's perhaps. Or maybe hers.

We sat down on it.

“You think you've figured out what happened to my
mamm
the day she died, and you're right about one thing. There had been an argument. She sent me to my room, and I snuck out without her knowing it. But I didn't ignore her calls for me because I wasn't in the barn when she fell. I was nowhere near the barn.”

Clarity fell across me like a spill of light into a dark room. “You came here that afternoon. To be alone? And maybe away from her?”

Priscilla looked down at her hands and shook her head. “Yes. I did come here. But no. It wasn't about me and her. I came here to meet up with the boy I thought was in love with me.”

PART TWO

T
WENTY
-S
EVEN

I
n the days, weeks, and even months that would follow our conversation in the birch trees, I would look back on the stretch of time when Priscilla shared her story as though it existed outside the span of our appointed days. As she talked, time seemed to stop, and I was ushered into the quiet, private folds of her memories as a rare guest. The only guest. Her words would stretch across my mind and stitch themselves into the fabric of my own needy soul.

She had crept out of her room the afternoon her mother died to meet a boy. His name was Connor, and he was a guest at the cottage. He was sixteen,
Englisch
, and the first boy to ever show even the slightest interest in Priscilla.

The summer she was fourteen, Connor Knight and his divorced mother, Elaine, were guests at the cottage. They came at the beginning of August, Elaine to work on her dissertation on how historical cultures struggle to survive despite modernity, and Connor because she wouldn't let him stay home alone for a month at their house on Long Island. Connor had made some poor choices earlier that summer and during the school year, so this was her form of discipline. He was cut off from his rowdy friends, the drinking parties, his Xbox, and the video games she didn't approve of. She took away his cell phone, and he was stuck in Lancaster County with a case of books she
required him to read—old classics, mostly—and running shoes she insisted he use. Apparently, he had been on the track team that spring until he was put on academic suspension for failing grades.

It was obvious to Priscilla that Connor wasn't happy about being there, but she could also tell within a few days after meeting him that he didn't really want to wreck his life. He felt bad about the mistakes he had made and the peer pressure he'd caved in to. He didn't want to be at the cottage with his mother, but he also didn't want to go back to New York and be the same guy he was when he left. He found Priscilla easy to talk to because she was so quiet. She just sat and listened. Priscilla would bring the Knights their breakfast in the mornings, and many times Elaine would be holed up in her room tapping away at her laptop when Priscilla came back for the dishes. Connor would be sitting on the steps with one of the books his mother had instructed him to read, but he'd just be staring off toward the grain fields that stretched beyond the Kinsinger dwellings. Before she knew it, she'd be sitting next to him, listening to him talk about his friends back in New York and how hard it was to figure out life.

Priscilla wasn't attracted to him at first. She felt sorry for him. And when he asked her if she had ever done something with a friend she'd never do if she were alone, just because the friend did it, she was completely honest with him. Because she wasn't trying to impress him, she plainly told him that was a dumb reason to do anything. Any friend who would like a person less because he made his own choices was no friend worth sacrificing his convictions for.

Connor had laughed and said convictions were for criminals. Priscilla told him he might want to try having some before brushing them off completely, as it was obvious he didn't really know what they were. And he told her he had never met anyone like her before. But she could tell he meant it in an admirable way—Connor didn't think she was weird.

One evening, he came into the petting barn as Priscilla was taking care of the animals and asked her what was the use of having ironclad convictions if it meant you were alone. Priscilla said she'd rather be alone and make her own decisions about the person she wanted to be than to be surrounded by people she was so desperate to please that she copied their every stupid move.

Connor began to seek her out after that. He'd come back from a run, and Priscilla would be weeding the vegetable garden or hanging laundry, and he'd stand there and talk to her, sometimes for an hour. In these talks, Priscilla learned that Connor's parents had divorced when he was eight and his dad
now lived in Florida. He saw him two weeks in June and at Thanksgiving. She told him about her
daed
and how she missed him. Even though they were worlds apart, Connor and Priscilla had two huge things in common. They missed their fathers, and they both felt trapped by their current situations. He felt trapped in friendships that were bringing him down and by the strict rules his mother had laid out for the summer, and she felt trapped by her mother's constant protective hand on her.

One day they were in the petting barn, and Connor was helping Priscilla feed and water all the animals. They were talking about what they would change about their lives if they could. She told him she sometimes snuck away to a lovely birch grove on moonlit nights, that she rode her father's horse there, bareback, and it was in those moments that she felt she wasn't trapped after all. She felt free. Those secret midnight rides made all the other days of her life possible. He asked her when the next full moon was and if she would bring him there. Priscilla thought maybe he was joking, but he took her hand and said he really wanted to see the creek—and her—by moonlight.

He was still holding her hand when Sharon stepped into the barn to tell Priscilla something; she didn't even know what because Sharon never actually got to it. The look she gave Priscilla was one she'd never forget. Connor let go of her hand and said hello to Sharon, but she didn't acknowledge him. She just said Priscilla was to come to the house. Priscilla told her she'd be there in a minute, that she was almost finished, and her mother said, “No. Now.”

Priscilla, embarrassed and angry, followed her mother into the house. Inside, Sharon told Priscilla that she was not to be alone with ‘that
Englisch
boy,' as she called him, for the remainder of the Knights' time at the cottage. She was to have no contact with the Knights at all. Sharon would bring their breakfast to them for the last week of their stay. And she would have Owen take care of the barn animals if Priscilla could not see to it that she did it without that
Englisch
boy's company.

Priscilla told her
mamm
that neither Connor nor she had done anything wrong, that she had only been encouraging him to make better decisions with his life. But Sharon didn't want to hear it. She told Priscilla she'd seen the way Connor was looking at her just then, when her hand was in his.