Until the End of Time (20 page)

The smell of fresh lumber was everywhere in the air, as the men began working. There was shouting and singing, and people calling to one another, and by mid-morning, the women had a hearty meal
set out on long tables, and poured lemonade and cold tea from pitchers into tall glasses, to quench their mighty thirst.

Lillibet had loved house raisings since she was a child. All of her brothers would be helping that day, and she joined the other women in serving food onto plates. The men ate heartily and went rapidly back to work in order to finish by day’s end.

The house was standing by dusk and finished on the second day. It had been a good weekend. They had returned back to work on it after the Sunday meeting. Vast amounts of wholesome foods were consumed that weekend, and Lillibet was tired but happy when she went back to their own home on Sunday afternoon. She had cooked six chickens to add to the lunch table, and ten the day before. She had made hardboiled eggs and several salads with lettuce from their farm. The chickens were from their henhouse, and she still had to prepare dinner for her own family, her father and younger brothers, that night. Her four much older brothers from her father’s first marriage were all married and would go home with their children and wives. Lillibet had her chores to do when she got home—the cows had to be milked as always, the chickens fed, and the goats fed and watered.

She chafed at her chores sometimes, but never during house raisings—there was always something so exciting about it. In this case, it had been for a family that had outgrown their old home with the birth of their sixth child, whose mother had gone to school with Lillibet, until they both graduated from the one-room schoolhouse in eighth grade. Their lives were not too dissimilar now, since Lillibet cared for her three younger brothers and father
but had no husband or children of her own. She had no need of a new house, and the two young women had chatted amiably at the lunch table as her old school friend watched her new home materialize in a matter of two days. Her eyes had glowed as she held her baby in her arms.

When Lillibet went to bed that night, she was tired from her own contributions to the busy two days, but satisfied at having been part of it. Her brothers and father had been exhausted from hard labor and had gone to bed early. Lillibet lay in bed that night and thought about the life they all shared. She loved their community, and the way they helped one another. It gave her a sense of being part of something more important than just her own family. As she drifted off to sleep, she found herself thinking about her brother Markus and how warm he had been when she touched his cheek before he went to bed, and she wondered if he was falling ill. She’d have to check him more closely in the morning.

And the next day, shortly after she got up, she had her answer. All three of her brothers had come out in spots. She had acted as their mother for long enough to know that it was chicken pox, so she wasn’t overly worried, but now all their chores would fall to her as well. That was not good news—she had enough to do without taking on their work too. But caring for them was all part of the duties that had fallen to her when her mother died, and she had acted as mother and female head of the household for the past seven years. After checking on her brothers and bringing them all breakfast, she went out to the barn to milk the cows. The boys were miserable with their chicken pox, which had burst forth during the night. She knew
they had exposed others the day before, but there was nothing to do about it now.

Lillibet was a wisp-thin young girl with white blond hair poking out from under her black bonnet, and she pushed the last of the cows away as she finished milking. Usually her younger brothers helped her. They were eleven-year-old twins, Josiah and Markus. But since both were sick today, as was Wilhelm—Willy, her fourteen-year-old brother—all the chores would fall to her. Their sister Bernadette, who would have been nineteen now, had died before their mother, when she was ten. She had died of pneumonia during a flu epidemic. Now Lillibet was her father’s only surviving daughter, and he relied on her to run their home.

Lillibet’s father, Henryk Petersen, had married her mother when she was a mere girl of sixteen, after his first wife died, leaving him with four sons who were all older than his new bride. Rebekah, when Henryk married her, had been a studious, quiet young woman, who had turned out to be more strong-willed than he had expected, but a good woman who had borne him five children and was respectful of him, although she had her own ideas and always had her nose in books, more than he liked. She had shared her passion for literature with their children, but only Lillibet took after her, and read voraciously, under her mother’s tutelage, and despite Henryk’s objections. She gave Lillibet the classics to read as she was growing up: Jane Austen, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Balzac, Proust, Henry James, Alexandre Dumas, all the greats of literature, which Lillibet devoured. Henryk preferred that they confine their studies to readings of the
Bible, but Rebekah had been very brave in standing firm in her beliefs of what her children should read. The boys were more like their father, while Lillibet took after her. They worked hard on the farm, as did Lillibet in their home. She was a dreamer, but also a bright, hard-working girl.

Rebekah’s own mother had favored education, and her father, like Henryk, had been an elder of the church, with traditional and extremely conservative ideas. And Henryk was much like him, and hadn’t mellowed over the years. If anything, he got sterner and more traditional as he grew older, particularly so after his wife Rebekah’s death, which had nearly broken his spirit. Like the others in the community, he had declared his forgiveness of the man who had killed her and five little girls, in a shooting at the West Nickel Mines School seven years before. But he had wrestled with his own sense of peace about it ever since.

Lillibet had been seventeen when her mother was killed and had graduated from the school four years before the shooting. Her mother frequently helped the teacher at the one-room schoolhouse, which went through eighth grade, and Rebekah happened to be there that day when a crazed gunman entered the building, took several hostages, shot ten little girls, five of whom had ultimately survived, and then killed himself. The school had been torn down ten days later, and the New Hope School replaced it six months after, in a nearby location, constructed to look entirely different from the building where the tragedy had occurred. The entire surrounding community of non-Amish people had been deeply sympathetic and supportive, having experienced the kindness and observed the decency of their Amish neighbors for many years. It had
been the first and only act of violence against their community in history.

Lillibet and her family were members of the Old Order Amish Community of Nickel Mines, in Bart Township of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. They lived almost exactly as their forefathers had when they established the community over three hundred years before, with no modern conveniences, no electricity, no telephones, and they drove no vehicles. Their transportation was by horse and buggy, and they cultivated the land with the help of tools and implements that had been used for centuries. The only change that occurred after the shooting was that there were two phones in the community now, kept in boxes at the edge of the farms, to be accessed only in emergency, in case another tragedy should happen.

They wore somber clothes in the same style as their ancestors, with no zippers or buttons. Lillibet’s gray apron, as she milked the cows, was held to her black cotton dress, which covered her to her ankles and wrists, with straight pins. And her black bonnet, tied loosely beneath her chin in the heat, was identical to what her female ancestors had worn. Her only accessories were high laced-up boots and heavy black cotton stockings. Her father and the men in the community wore strict black Amish garb, long coats on Sundays, and the flat black wide-brimmed beaver or felt hats that were traditional, and straw hats in summer. Young men were clean-shaven until they married, and then they wore beards. Mustaches were forbidden. Women never cut their hair, wearing it in braids, or buns, with their bonnets.

Observing the Amish in her community, and the way they lived, there was no hint that they existed in a modern century. They were
untouched by the modern world, lived in seclusion on their farms, and kept to themselves.

They were a devout, upstanding people, attached to their families. They took no charity from government agencies, no welfare, Social Security, or unemployment, and they were helpful to the communities around them. Several of the younger men in the Old Order served as volunteers in local fire departments. But other than that, the Amish stayed among themselves and did not mingle outside their community. And Lillibet’s father Henryk was a particularly staunch believer that the “English,” as the Amish referred to outsiders, had their world, and the Amish had their own. There was no place for the English in their lives. They respected them, and did business with them when necessary, but always in a distant way. Their community was not open to English visitors or friends. History and their religious beliefs had taught them that the two worlds did not blend. The rare young people who left their Amish homes, under strong ostracism from their families, did not return and were not encouraged to do so. Once tainted by the outside world and the English, they became outcasts from their former homes, sometimes officially “shunned.” They were governed by a strict set of rules called the Ordnung, which told them what they could and could not do, and which they lived by rigorously. Young people in the Amish community were expected to remain among their own kind, follow the traditions, and carry them forward to future generations, and most Amish did. They could not intermarry with the English, only Amish.

It was a very unusual occurrence for a young Amish person to leave. One could not live in the community or follow the rules by half-measures. There was no bending of the rules for anyone. Henryk
was an elder in the Old Order, and one of the sternest members of the board of elders. Lillibet’s mother Rebekah had softened him somewhat while she was alive, or tried to, but in the seven years since her death, he had grown more rigid in his beliefs. And more and more lately, he preferred to speak Pennsylvania Dutch, a derivative of German, rather than English. It was a symbol of his preference for the old ways. He spoke to his children most often in German.

Lillibet brushed the flies away as she emptied the pails of milk into the large metal containers they used to take the milk to the dairy. They were heavy as she carried them to the cold room, a job usually performed by her brother Willy, or Josiah and Markus when she could get them to help. But with all three of them sick with chicken pox, she had to manage on her own. When she went back to check on the boys at lunchtime, they were miserable and itching, and she made cold compresses for them for their fevers, and all three boys were suffering in the heat. Lillibet had been mother, daughter, cook, housekeeper, farmhand, and slave to the men in her family since her mother’s death. She knew it was her duty, and never complained.

Her mother had died at the time when Lillibet should have been taking a husband. Several men approached her father shortly after, but Lillibet had had no interest in the men in their community and, since her mother’s death, no time to spend with them. She was too busy cooking, cleaning, doing chores, and bringing up her three brothers, who had been so young when their mother died. And now at twenty-four, she felt as though she had had all the responsibilities and disadvantages of a married woman, and she had no desire to do it again, for any man. And no man they knew had even remotely
touched her heart. Several older widowers, like her father when he married her mother, widowed with four grown boys, had approached Henryk, anxious to win her hand, and she had rebuffed them all.

Now, when they broached the subject with him, he told them honestly that she was beautiful, unquestionably, and capable, and a serious, intelligent girl, but she was not a friendly young woman and had no interest in men. He had come to believe that she preferred to stay with him, bring up her brothers, and remain unmarried for the rest of her days. Her only passion was reading and studying, both the Bible and the box of books her mother had left her, which Lillibet had read many times over the years, by candlelight, late at night, more even than her father suspected. She devoured everything she could read. And she begged the schoolteacher to lend her any books they had. Reading was the greatest pleasure in her life.

Her only male friend was a boy she had gone to school with, Friedrich, Freddie. Her mother had been hopeful she would fall in love with him, but they had been childhood friends forever, he was too young, and he had since married a sweet and docile young woman whom Lillibet had never really liked, and they had four children. Freddie’s life was light-years from Lilli’s now, although they still chatted from time to time after church meetings on Sundays, and he still worshipped Lillibet. They had had so much fun when they were young. His wife said Lilli had all the makings of a spinster now, but he felt sorry for her—he knew how hard she worked taking care of her father and brothers, and working on their farm. She had had too serious an existence for such a young girl, catapulted into
her mother’s shoes by tragedy at seventeen. And he knew what a dreamer she was, lost in the books she kept hidden from her father. Freddie was sorry her life had turned out the way it had. And her little brothers were hellions, always into mischief and keeping her busy. And her father was a robust man, who could live another twenty years. The only time Freddie saw Lillibet was at church meetings on Sundays, which rotated between houses every week and lasted three hours, with the men in one room and the women in another.

After tending to her brothers at lunchtime, Lillibet carried the heavy cans of milk out of the cold room. She shooed the chickens out of her way and had already fed them. She had left chicken broth on the stove for the boys to eat at dinner, with vegetables from their garden. And she had to bring the milk to Lattimer’s Dairy, with no one else to do it. Her brother Willy had graduated from school the year before at thirteen and usually helped her with the heavy chores, but he was no use to her today.