Patrick E. Craig's Blog, page 2

A Two-Edged Sword

Two weeks later, Daniel was hanging around outside the post office. He […]

Merry Christmas and a very blessed New Year!

May the simplicity that infuses the Amish way of life transfer itself to you and yours this holiday season.  And may the simple Joy of Christmas and the wonderful reality of a small child, born in a manger to become the Savior of a lost and dying world, be the light that guides you through the days ahead.

Patrick

The post Merry Christmas and a very blessed New Year! appeared first on Patrick E. Craig.

Many Sorrows – The Amish Heiress

Rachel looked up. Jenny stood in the doorway of her room looking at the half-packed suitcase on the bed. Rachel saw the look on her mama’s face, but she steeled herself against it and continued packing.

“But where will you go, Rachel? How will you live?”

“Aren’t you forgetting, Mama, that I am about to become a billionaire? The St. Clairs have already rented me an apartment in New York, and I’ll live there until Gerald and I are…”

Rachel saw the pain on her mama’s face.

“Please, Rachel, you must not do this thing. You do not even know this man. How can you even consider marriage? What about courtship? What about getting to know each other first?”

“Gerald is handsome, he is attentive and I believe he has come to care for me. As of now we have a business arrangement, but who knows… I may come to love him. That would be an added bonus.”

“He only cares about the money, Rachel!!”

“Gerald thinks I’m beautiful and he told me that he feels more for me than just friendship, but that is beside the point, Mama. He is my ticket out of this place. I want to go to school to become a veterinarian. Gerald has no problem with that. The money I will inherit will pay for the best schools in the world. I have already looked into the Royal Veterinary College in London. The St. Clairs have a house there and we could live there while I attend.”

“But I thought you wanted to go to Cornell?”

“What does that matter to you, Mama? Papa wouldn’t let me go or pay my way anyway. He could, you know. He made a lot of money when he was Richard Sandbridge.”

Jenny looked away.

“Rachel, your papa gave most of that money away when he came back to the church. He wanted to disconnect himself from everything that happened to him in those eight years he was gone.”

Rachel turned back to her packing.

“Another brilliant decision by Jonathan Hershberger aka Richard Sandbridge.”

“Rachel, why do you hate him so?”

Rachel felt her hands clenching as she stood with her back to her mama. Then the frustration of the last four years spilled out.

“What do you expect, Mama? When he left us it nearly killed me…”

“He did not leave us, Rachel. He couldn’t help what happened.”

“Mama, let me finish.”

Jenny stopped and Rachel went on.

“When he left us, everything changed. We went back to Ohio and you were so sad for so long. Everything was about you, your sorrow, your grief. What about my grief? At least I had I grossdaadi and grossmutter, and I was okay for a while. Then they died and I was so afraid.”

“Afraid, Rachel?”

“Yes, Mama. I was afraid – afraid you would leave me too. I used to wake up at night feeling like someone was standing on my chest. I just knew something was going to happen to you too. And then he came home and it did happen.”

“What happened, Rachel?”

“You left me, Mama.”

“But how, Rachel? I was right here all the time.”

Rachel’s voice rose.

“No, Mama, you were not. Suddenly we had a stranger in our house and everything was about him. Poor Jonathan, he’s not well. Poor Jonathan, he shouldn’t be disturbed. You never had time for me anymore and I hated that.”

As she spoke Rachel stepped closer to her mama until she was standing in front of Jenny, shaking like a leaf.

“You left me, Mama! You may have been here physically, but you were gone. Gone taking care of a poor fool who couldn’t even remember his name most of the time. He certainly didn’t remember me. And all he could do was shove rules down my throat. The ordnung this, the ordnung that. I got to the point where I hated that word.”

Rachel took her mother by the arms and looked right into her eyes.

“Don’t you understand, Mama? I hate being Amish. And now God has opened a door for me to leave. And I’m going.”

Rachel went to the closet and pulled down some more things.

“Rachel, I don’t believe it is God who has opened this door.”

“Who is it then, the devil?”

“If you consider the people you will be with, the man you are marrying…”

Rachel flung the clothes on the bed.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about! You haven’t even taken the time to meet them, to talk to them.”

“But they are Englisch, Rachel.”

Rachel pointed her finger at Jenny.

“And so are you, Mama, so are you. You’re a St. Clair too, and if you will be honest, you will see that the St. Clair side of you has always fought against being Amish.”

“No, Rachel, you are wrong. I have always loved being Amish.”

“Right, Mama. That’s why you write books, and get your column published in the paper and meet people from outside the church, while everyone looks the other way. Everyone says that an Amish girl can’t become a vet. Well, what about an Amish girl who becomes a famous writer? The truth is that writing is the way you escape from everything Amish. Where do you go when you lock yourself in your room and write? You go away, Mama, you go away. For you to oppose me is so hypocritical. I expected better of you! ”

 

©2014 Many Sorrows from The Amish Heiress by Patrick E. Craig – A work in progress.

The post Many Sorrows – The Amish Heiress appeared first on Patrick E. Craig.

Many Sorrows

Rachel looked up. Jenny stood in the doorway of her room looking […]

Daniel’s Heart – from The Amish Heiress

Daniel King stood on the high knoll behind his father’s house. It was just before dawn on an early April morning. Far away to the east a dark row of trees marked the horizon. Long, smooth clouds drifted through the slowly brightening sky. A golden glow began to grow around the tops of the trees and as it did, the billows above were touched with a beautiful orange that faded into a dusky pink that reached toward heaven. Above it all, the deep indigo of the dying night held time fixed in perfect suspension. It was that mystical moment, just before the day begins, when all nature holds its breath, as though waiting for an unheard command from on high. Then the tiniest sliver of sun peeked over the eastern hills and the world exhaled. A small breeze stirred and Daniel felt the soft brush of nature’s breath against his face. A familiar peace flooded over him. His heart was filled with a deep sense of connection to the land and especially to this place.

The light gathered itself into golden shafts that pierced the cobalt depths and the green fields of Paradise materialized below him, reaching away to the east. One by one, Daniel began to pick out the Amish farms that surrounded Solomon King’s property. Off to the right was the Beachey place with the finest milk cows in Lancaster County. Up the road, nestled in a thick stand of Chestnut trees were the Masts, and beyond them, the Nissleys and the Ottos. The three families were all related – carpenters and woodworkers that produced wonderful handcrafted furniture. Down the hill to his left he could see the potato fields of the Glick farm, and beyond that the Keim’s first hay cutting was a bright patch of green that prophesied good feed for the King horses this year. Daniel could almost see the names on the mailboxes that lined Leacock Road – Umble, Troyer, Swartzendruber, Raber, Petershwim, Shetler, Stoltzfus, Yoder, and Zook. Each name held a story, not only for Daniel, but also for the Amish community that had lived and prospered here since 1720.

Daniel’s eyes turned to the blue farmhouse a half-mile away. It was the old Borntraeger place, now the Hershberger farm. It, too, was part of the long continuum of Daniel’s people in Pennsylvania, for Jenny Hershberger was a Borntraeger, and her story was a great illustration to Daniel of how der kluge und liebende Gott had kept his hand on the Plain people of Lancaster County and held them to their inheritance.

In a way we are like the people of Israel, who have an inheritance forever in their land. Gott promised it to them and He always keeps His promise.

Daniel sighed and half-heartedly kicked at a large stone that was half-buried in the dirt. After a few nudges the stone broke loose and rolled away down the hill. Daniel watched as it rolled and bounced down into the small creek that meandered along the base of the knoll.

That stone is Rachel. She wants to go rolling away and she will. She will fall into the river of the world and be swept away and leave this place. And she will never know the peace that is here, all around us.

A small black buggy rolled along Leacock toward the old Philadelphia Turnpike. Daniel could not make out the driver’s face, but he didn’t have to, for he knew that buggy well. A big white gelding with a flowing mane pulled it.

It’s Tuesday and Andy Peterswhim, is on his was to the market for his mother.

As Daniel watched the buggy disappear around the tree-shadowed bend in the road, he took comfort in the symmetry of his life. The seasons came and went, the crops were planted and then harvested, the people were born, they lived, and they died. It was all part of a mysterious cycle that set his people apart, a cycle that only an uncluttered heart could see. It was timeless, stretching away into the past and moving forward into the future, like a great river that is always changing, filling its banks, ever-moving, catching the sun with a million different diamond-sparkle facets of its surface and yet somehow, to the casual observer, always the same, always there. For Daniel, that was the secret of the Plain Way. It was always there, appearing to be fixed, yet when each day started, it was always a new journey, without any missteps to mar the way. If a man was accountable for his actions, to himself and to others, and spazieren gegangen im Licht des Gottes there was much grace for living and every thing that happened seemed to work together for the good.

With a deep sigh, Daniel turned and started down the hill. The path through the small woods was as familiar to him as the walls of his room. He had been coming to the top of the knoll since he was a small child and it was, for him, a castle keep where he could take refuge from the pressures of the world and sort out his thoughts. Many times when they were small children, he and Rachel had come here to play, but then Rachel had moved away and it seemed as though a great piece of Daniel’s life went with her. And later, when she returned and began to blossom into womanhood, the dictates of the ordnung had separated them even more and Daniel had to content himself with watching Rachel grow lovelier each day from afar.

He stopped and picked up a broken-off branch that had fallen from the huge Buckeye tree that stood a little below the crest of the ridge. There had been a storm a week ago and the ancient Chestnut had shed many small branches and limbs, and yet it still stood, strong and defiant, unmoved from the place it had been growing for over one hundred years. To Daniel, it was a symbol of all that was permanent in his life. It was under that tree that he and Rachel had pledged to be friends forever when they were only six years old.   He began to absent-mindedly whisk the trail in front of him with the branch as he walked, and as he did, the old yearning rose inside. Rachel! Rachel! Sie leben immer in meinem Herzen! He struck the stick against a small bay tree as he walked past and the branch broke in his hand. His heart sank as he tried to come to grips with his feelings for the girl. She was an enigma to him. Daughter of an Außenseiter father and a half-Amish mother, Rachel had not lived the normal life of an Amish girl. When Rachel was seven her father disappeared and Rachel and her mother, Jenny, went to Ohio to live. They were gone almost three years and then suddenly one day, Rachel was back at the farm. But she was no longer the carefree child that had been Daniel’s playmate. Word filtered back to Paradise about the tragic events that had taken the lives of Jenny’s parents, and Daniel began to understand the deep sadness that wrapped Rachel like a winter coat.

Daniel tried to re-establish their friendship, but Rachel was stand-offish and quiet. Once Daniel asked her whether she still liked him. She would not answer him, but Daniel knew somehow that Rachel was afraid of getting close to anyone. And then when her father had literally come back from the dead, Rachel grew even more distant. Jonathan had been an amnesia victim for almost eight years and he still struggled with physical issues that made him unstable emotionally, and the volatility played havoc with his relationship with Rachel. With no where else to place the blame for her circumstances, Rachel had come to blame being Amish as the root of all her sorrow and confusion. Now she looked elsewhere for her joy and Daniel could see it in her eyes when he was with her. Even when things seemed normal between them, it was as though she was looking through him, past the everyday of life in Paradise, to a place that Daniel could hardly even comprehend. When she began talking about going away to school, his heart ached. And yet Daniel could see the gift in her, a gift of healing and caring and he knew that it was something that Gott had placed within her. So Daniel’s heart was torn. Torn between wanting to be close to Rachel again and letting her go to fulfill her dream, if that would make her happy.

 

The Amish Heiress ©2014  A Work-in-Progress

The post Daniel’s Heart – from The Amish Heiress appeared first on Patrick E. Craig.

Daniel’s Heart

Daniel King stood on the high knoll behind his father’s house. It […]

Painful Days – From The Amish Heiress by Patrick E. Craig

The grey-green sea rolled in long, choppy swells beneath the boat. The waves were endless, moving toward him out of the mist and disappearing away toward the unseen horizon. It was dark, so dark, and the strange smell of the salt water was overpowering and somehow terrifying. A stiff breeze drove the icy spray off the tops of the waves into Jonathan’s eyes. He raised his hand to wipe his face, but the mist and spray were continuous, blinding him. The chill of winter not yet dead… the gulls circling behind the boat… the plaintive cries whirling away on the wind. The sea ominous and dead…

He stood in the darkness and the cold and the spray and the waves, the endless waves, rolling, rolling, rolling by and where were they going? Suddenly a great longing to see Jenny and Rachel swept over him like one of the swells rolling ceaselessly and vanishing away, beyond his sight. He was lost, gone, alone on the bridge of a ghost ship that cut through the waves like a sword… He looked through the window into the wheelhouse, but there was no one to pilot the boat. Where was the captain? Then he felt a hand touch him. He turned to see his father standing there with him, but his father was dead, dead as the grey-green waves. Or was he? He felt his father’s hand squeeze his shoulder and then he smiled.

“Thank you, Son,” and then his father was gone, gone like a cool breeze that touches the face on a blistering day in the desert and then slips away leaving only regret behind…

But I’m not in the desert, I’m on this boat on the ocean and I’m alone and lost in the dark and I’m freezing… Dad! Dad! Help me, please…

Then the boat lurched to the right as he heard the muffled explosion. The huge craft twisted like a snake and the abrupt distortion of the boat’s course threw Jonathan to the deck. As he lay there, stunned, he saw his mother come out of her stateroom and try to make her way forward.

My Mother! But she’s dead too! What’s happening?

Then there was fire! Fire and smoke blowing through the middle of the boat… And then he was deep in the water, and above him he saw the churning waves. It was cold, so cold and he couldn’t breathe and then he was swimming, swimming upward toward the light and the fire, the fire on the water… His head broke the surface and he gasped for air. Burning diesel fuel covered the waves. He was in the flames and he felt the fire burning his face, burning melting, reaching for his eyes…

And then he saw his father again and his mother was with his father, not twenty feet away on the boat, and they were smiling.

“Dad, Mom!”

His father looked straight into Jonathan’s eyes. He reached his hand toward Jonathan but he wasn’t afraid… Jonathan couldn’t hear him over the wind, but he saw his father’s mouth forming words.

“Son, I believe!”

At that instant the flames from the burning diesel fuel below deck ignited the propane tank in the galley and the Mistral exploded with a huge roar. Jonathan struggled in the water. He was in the fire and the water, burning and drowning. He looked up as debris from the boat came flying toward him. He watched in terror as the grey-green waves rolled over the deck             and Mistral sank. Within seconds there was nothing left except some floating pieces of wreckage driving west before the howling wind.

Jenny! Jenny!

“JENNY!!!”

 

The Amish Heiress is a work in progress from The Paradise Chronicles by Patrick E. Craig.

The post Painful Days – From The Amish Heiress by Patrick E. Craig appeared first on Patrick E. Craig.

Painful Days

The grey-green sea rolled in long, choppy swells beneath the boat. The […]

The Trail – from The Amish Heiress by Patrick E. Craig

Bobby Halverson studied the note in his hand as he ambled down the hill.

Augusta St. Clair.  Now there’s a name out of the past.

            He put the scrap of paper in his pocket as he walked around the side of the blue house to the garden. Jenny was kneeling down, digging up a bed. She had a basket with some tools and paper bags in it. She reached up and wiped the sweat off her brow with the back of her hand as she dug and then she looked up and saw Bobby standing there. She smiled at him but kept after her digging.

“Morning, Bobby. What brings you down the hill?”

Bobby laughed.

“I’m not so old I can’t get up and walk a few hundred yards, Jenny.”

“Give me a minute while I finish this bed, then we’ll go inside and I’ll pour you a cup of coffee. Get your motor turned over.”

She smiled up at him. He stood watching as she finished working the soil. At forty-five, Jenny Hershberger was still as lovely as when she was a girl back in Apple Creek, Ohio. Time had been kind to her. The untamed red-gold curls peeking out from under her kappe still shone in the sun and except for a few crinkles around the eyes, the perfect face was unlined. The only change that Bobby noticed was that sometimes he saw a deep sadness behind Jenny’s violet eyes. But given the events of the last few years and the circumstances surrounding the death of her parents, that was understandable. Finally she turned over the last few clumps of soil. She got up, wiped her hands on her apron and beckoned him to follow her.

“Where are the rest of the Hershbergers today?”

Jenny pointed out at the potato field behind the barn. Way out on the back of the property he could see Jonathan at work with a team of horses and a cultivator.

“Jonathan is weeding the potato rows and Rachel… Rachel left. I think she’s at Daniel King’s place. She said something about a new foal that needed looking after.”

“Are Rachel and Jonathan doing better these days?”

Jenny looked at Bobby as if measuring him and then sighed.

“Does that question have anything to do with why you dropped by?”

Bobby smiled.

             Not much gets past Jenny.

            “Kind of… but mostly just asking.”

Jenny held the screen door open and they went into the kitchen. She stopped at the cupboard and fetched down two mugs. Bobby pulled up a chair at the kitchen table while Jenny poured the coffee and added just the right amount of cream. Then she sat across from Bobby and pushed the mug toward him. Bobby put his hands around it, feeling the warmth in his aching fingers. Then he looked up at Jenny.

“I got a call from Bull yesterday.”

“Bull Halkovich?”

“Yep, Bull Halkovich.”

“And…”

That was one of the reasons Bobby loved Jenny – no shillyshally, always cut to the chase.

“Someone came to his house asking questions about your mother.”

“About Jerusha?”

“No, Jenny. They were looking for Rachel St. Clair or her daughter.”

Jenny’s eyes opened in surprise.

“Who even knows about Mama Rachel?”

“Augusta St. Clair.”

A shocked expression passed over Jenny’s face. She looked down at the table for a minute and then up at Bobby. The shock had turned to puzzlement.

“Why in the world would Augusta St. Clair be looking for me? From what Mama Rachel wrote about her in the journal, I know that Augusta St. Clair is not a nice person. She was the main reason for my real mother’s death. She threw her out on the streets of New York and left her homeless there. And now she’s looking for me? This can’t be good.”

Bobby nodded in agreement.

“You’re right about that. And after hearing Bull’s description of the messenger, I don’t have a good feeling either.”

“Why, Bobby?”

“Well, the man who came to Bull’s place sounds like a professional. Ex-marine, Special Forces, probably owns his own private investigation company or maybe provides security for the St. Clairs. In other words, he’s a man to be reckoned with. He gave Bull just enough information. When he left there, he knew Bull would call me.”

Jenny took a sip of her coffee.

“Why can’t we just ignore it? He doesn’t know where you live.”

“That’s what I’m saying, Jenny. If he’s the pro I think he is, he’ll find me. The St. Clairs have plenty of money so sooner or later, one of us will be getting a knock on the door.”

“What should I do, Bobby?”

“Let me handle it, Jenny. I’ll call the guy and see what he wants. If Augusta knows about me, it’s because she probably found Sammy Bender and “interviewed” him. So she’s probably been out to Patterson to see Magdalena Bender. That means that if she follows the same trail we did, eventually she will find out about your grandfather and this farm. It won’t take them long to dig around and find out that Rachel Borntraeger St. Clair’s daughter is now Jenny Hershberger and that you are living back here.”

“Why do you think she’s looking for us?”

Bobby looked in his cup. The cream made swirling patterns, dark brown like Guadalcanal mud…

“Bobby?”

“Oh, sorry. It probably has to do with money. Probably something that your grandfather Robert had access to but she doesn’t. That’s just my guess, but people like Augusta St. Clair operate that way. I’ve seen it before. Unless something has happened to stir up the hornet’s nest, I’m sure she would never look for you.”

“So what does that mean for us?”

“It’s means that you need to let me do the talking and don’t volunteer anything. Don’t speak to their agent unless I’m in the room and whatever you do, don’t sign anything. She’s after something, most likely money, and remembering what she did to your mama, she’ll probably do a lot to get it.”

 

The Amish Heiress is a Work in Progress from the Paradise Chronicles by Patrick E. Craig

The post The Trail – from The Amish Heiress by Patrick E. Craig appeared first on Patrick E. Craig.

The Trail

 Bobby Halverson studied the note in his hand as he ambled down […]