The Road Home (33 page)

The clouds had cleared away, and there was enough light to see the trail. Jorge ran down the trail to the left, looking for tracks, and Luis ran to the right. In a few minutes Jorge came upon a set of tracks coming up out of the creek bed. The snow had been disturbed, and he could see where someone had lain in the snow. He walked over and looked closer. There were some spots of blood in the snow between two rocks, and something had been pulled up out of the sand.

It looks like she hurt herself. That means she's walking slow
.

Jorge ran back to the bank and looked at the tracks. The left foot was dragging in the snow, and there was a strange mark on the left side of the tracks. Jorge could see that Jenny must be using a stick to lean on. He hurried on down the trail following the tracks until he came to a place in the snow where she must have fallen—there was a handprint, and the snow off the trail was disturbed. Jorge had forgotten Luis' instructions about returning, so he continued on. In about twenty minutes he came to an area where the walls of the ravine closed in. The tracks led on down the trail around a corner. Jorge ran around the corner and stopped in bewilderment. Ahead of him, shrubs and trees overhung the trail, and the snow had not come down here. Jenny's tracks led up to the edge of the snow and then disappeared on the hard ground under the tree.

Jenny hobbled down the path leaning on the stick. The nylon line was strong, and it supported the broken pine branch against her still throbbing ankle.

Suddenly she stepped on a hidden rock, rolled her bad ankle, and pitched forward into the snow. The pain was agonizing. She tried to get up and realized she was going to have a hard time going any farther. She looked around for a place to hide. The light from the sun was slowly illuminating the sky. Ahead of her was a clump of bushes, and it seemed that it was darker behind them. She randomly poked the pine stick into the bushes, and instead of the wall of the ravine, her stick encountered a hole in the side of the hill.

A cave!

Jenny knew she had to hide somewhere, but her tracks would give her away. Then she remembered something Uncle Bobby had told her about hiding from the Japanese when he was a scout in the Marines.

“We would walk out to a place where the ground made our tracks
hard to see and then walk backward in our tracks until we came to where we wanted to hide,” he had told her. “Then we would jump off the trail and walk backward using a branch to sweep our tracks away. The enemy often walked right by where we were hiding and lost us. Some of the Indian guys taught us that in training.”

Up ahead the ravine narrowed, and the snow had not covered the trail because of the brush overhanging it. Jenny broke a branch off a Scotch broom and walked up the trail until there was no more snow. She stepped out onto the hard trail and took a few steps. Then she stepped backward as carefully as she could in her tracks until she came to the bush that hid the mouth of the cave. She gathered her strength and jumped off the trail.

Again an agonizing pain shot up her leg. She gritted her teeth and began to inch backward into the bush, sweeping her tracks as she went. She pushed through and found the cave. It had a narrow, low entrance, but it looked big enough for her to wriggle through. She knelt down and crawled in.

Inside, the ceiling rose up into the darkness, and the floor was dry and sandy. She could see a little but not much. The cave seemed to go back a lot farther than she thought. Her ankle was throbbing horribly, and she was exhausted.

Suddenly she heard a rustling sound up in the roof of the cave, and out of the dark, something black came at her. Bats! Jenny's heart leaped up and she almost screamed. The bats fluttered all around her, brushing her with their wings in their effort to get out. She heard their tiny squeaks and felt their bodies hitting her head and shoulders, and then she collapsed in a heap on the floor.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-E
IGHT

A Quilt for Jenny

J
ERUSHA KNELT BY HER BED
and cried out to the Lord on Jenny's behalf. The Rose of Sharon quilt was spread out before her, restored to its former beauty. Where the corner had been torn and the batting matted, Jerusha had skillfully pieced in new batting and sewn it with such tiny stitches that unless she looked at it very closely, she couldn't tell it had ever been damaged. All of the ruined red silk rose petals had been replaced, and the mud and water stains had been removed by slow and careful washing. Now it was as she remembered it, the most beautiful quilt she had ever made. Jerusha's thoughts carried her back to the days when she had labored over the quilt, planning her escape from the Amish life and cursing God for taking Jenna from her. She thought at the time that she was making the quilt for Jenna, a memorial to her precious little girl.

How You dealt with my heart, Lord. I was so proud and arrogant in those days. I believed You had killed Jenna because You hated me for my skill as a quilter. Now I know that we live in a sin-cursed world where bad things happen. But I also know that You are the one who gave me my skill and that every quilt I make comes from You and not from me
.

She remembered when she had to make the choice between saving the quilt and saving Jenny from the storm. After she made the decision, she realized that the quilt had not been made only for Jenna, her firstborn, but also for Jenny, the little lost girl. And as she surrendered her own plans and the bitterness that was killing her, she found a wonderful blessing in the life of the little girl God gave her.

It was like the story of Job. Everything he had was gone, but in the end he repented and blessed God, and God restored everything and more
.

Now Jenny was lost, and Reuben and Bobby had gone to find her. But Jerusha wasn't angry with God. No, this time it was different. She trusted Him with Jenny's life, and her prayers ascended to heaven on her daughter's behalf.

Bobby and Gary and the rest of the men gathered in the front room. Three sullen men were standing against the wall.

“Two guys are missing,” Johnny said. “Luis and a younger guy. They must have Jenny.” He slumped down in a chair and put his hands over his face. Reuben started to move toward the men, but Bobby put a hand on his arm and held him back.

“I'll talk to them, Reuben,” Bobby said.

He stepped in front of one of the men, a fat, beady-eyed, balding guy. “Where's the girl?” Bobby asked quietly.

The fat man just glared back at Bobby. Reuben stepped forward and locked eyes with him. The fat man immediately started talking. “Okay, okay, the girl's gone.”

Johnny looked up in surprise. “What do you mean, gone?”

“She got away when we were all out here drinking,” the fat man said. “She unlocked the door of the room somehow and ran out the back door. Jorge and Luis went to look for her. They wanted me to come, but I told them to find her themselves. It was too cold out there.”

Jerusha sat at the kitchen table as the first rays of dawn came up over the eastern fields. A kiss of frost had formed on the windows, and the beautiful crystalline patterns etched their magic on the glass. She lit a fire to take off the chill. Fall would soon be coming to an end, and it would be time for the Thanksgiving feast, for weddings, and for the friendly fellowship that the Amish shared together during the long winter months.

Once she would have felt great anticipation, but now her life seemed disconnected from everything but Jenny. It was hard for her to comprehend. She had lived in the simple way, she had been faithful to the
ordnung
, and she had shunned the world. But the world had crowded in on her life for the second time now, and once again her daughter was at the center of the storm. She thought of the Rose of Sharon and how the quilt had been inextricably bound to the lives of both of her daughters. And then it occurred to her—
The quilt is bound to my life too!

She remembered the days when she had cut the pieces for the rose pattern, more than a hundred perfectly duplicated pieces of silk, overlaid and stitched together to make the beautiful rose in the center of the quilt. She thought about the way the rose had shone in the soft light of dawn, the morning of the big storm before she left for the fair. Not one stitch out of place, not one pucker, each piece perfectly placed and bound together.

You are the quilter of our lives. Your hand places us perfectly into the pattern of Your plan for us—a plan that You have always had in mind
.

As Jerusha let the wonder of this revelation wash over her, the deep, peaceful voice that she had come to know again in these troubled days spoke to her spirit.

I sent you the Rose of Sharon quilt to awaken you, to tell you that I was
reaching for you. But you had forgotten. You thought that the peace you knew before Jenna came into this world was born from your faith, from your husband, from the land. But it was from Me
.

“Because you are the Prince of Peace?”

Yes. And Jenny has never known Me in that way. So she has never known peace. Jenny is looking for something out there in the world to give her peace. But she will only find it in Me
.

“Then tell me, Lord, how I must pray for Jenny.”

I have a plan for each of My children. But if My sheep cannot hear My voice, they will not follow Me into the sheepfold, where I can guard them and protect them. Jenny needs to hear My voice for herself, not from you or from Reuben. And until she does, she is in great danger. I have no granddaughters, Jerusha—only daughters. That is how you must pray
.