The Face of Heaven (9 page)

But when it came to letting him know she thought he was handsome, that his green eyes in the sunlight made her long to take him in her arms, that she loved the way he walked, so tall and straight and strong, she couldn’t bring the words out of her mouth. What was wrong with her? A dozen girls from the community would gladly trade places with her. Yet she couldn’t even respond that he was wonderful, brave, and sweet, after he told her a hundred times how stunning her blue eyes were, or how her red hair flamed, or how beautiful the strength was he saw in her hands and shoulders. Her silence made no sense to her and she couldn’t understand what stopped her tongue.

Still, as April became May and May turned into velvet June, with its bright flowers and trees thick with leaves and hay higher than a tall man’s head, it seemed to her that she and Nathaniel were getting closer and closer to the point where they both felt it might be time for him to sit down with her father and declare his intention to court her with the aim of asking for her hand in marriage. She was certain this would free her up inside so that she would finally be able to say all the things she wanted about his beauty and manliness and strong spirit. But just as finding Moses and Charlie in the barn that day had changed
everything, as had his words of affection to her in the hay field one rainy afternoon, something new burst into their lives once again and stood everything on its head.

Corinth had returned to Elizabethtown in the company of his father and brother the Saturday after he had run off to Harrisburg to enlist. For months, as the North and the South had proceeded steadily on divergent paths with little armed conflict, the young man had been content to remain at his family farm and help with the crops. But when a huge battle occurred at a place called Manassas Junction in Virginia in July, and the North was defeated, the King family woke to find that Corinth had disappeared from their midst yet again. This time a search of Harrisburg’s military depots turned up nothing. It wasn’t until a letter arrived from Indiana that the Kings learned Corinth had made his way to an Amish community there and was refusing to return home. The man who wrote the letter, kin to the Yoders, explained that Corinth had made it clear he would only talk with his older brother Nathaniel. So Lyndel went out to milk her cows at four o’clock one August morning to find a perfect red rose from someone’s garden lying across the top of her milking bucket.

She felt wonderful and sad at the same time. Although there was no note attached, there wasn’t a doubt in her mind that the rose was from Nathaniel. It had to do with his affection for her, of course, but she felt it was also about beginnings and endings and this stirred up the mix of emotions within her. Not knowing what else to do, she upended her milking bucket, sat on it, cried for a few minutes, then tucked the rose in her
kapp
while she went about her chores. She decided that once she had finished milking she would go to her room and carefully press the rose between the pages of her Bible at Psalm 91.

A loud creaking of wheels made her raise her head from her work.

“Hello, the Keim farm!” a man called. “Is anyone about?”

Lyndel stood up and went to the barn door. She recognized the voice. The visitor was Nathaniel’s father, Adam King.

“Mr. King.” She greeted him with a smile. “
Guten Morgen.
”

He nodded from the seat of his buggy. “
Guten Morgen.
I have come to bring you news. You and your father.”

“What news is that?”

“Nathaniel has left on the train. He boarded late last night.”

Lyndel bit her lip. “He has gone to Indiana to bring back Corinth?” Mr. King stared at her. His brown eyes were soft. “He left for Indiana, yes. But not to bring back Corinth. He went to enlist.”

Lyndel felt ice move through her body. “What?”

“There is a telegram from Pittsburgh they brought to the house an hour ago.” Mr. King extended a slip of paper. “He talks to you.”

She reached up and took the telegram from his hand.

Father, I have not gone to fetch Corinth. I have gone to join him. I will enlist in the Union Army and request to be enrolled in the same regiment. Lyndel, I did not know how to tell you. I still don’t. I take up arms because I see Charlie Preston’s eyes when your father and I cut him down from the tree. No matter what else has gone on since that day his eyes and face are with me. I must put my body between the slave driver and the slave. I realize I may never see you again. But my God knows how much I love you. Goodbye.

6

L
yndel’s shock at reading Nathaniel’s message soon turned to anger at his unwillingness to face her in person…to at least say goodbye. What if it were true that they would never see each other again? How could he leave like this? Had he been merely teasing when he spoke of courtship?

But as the days turned to weeks, so too the anger turned to forgiveness, worry, and prayers for Nathaniel’s safety. The latter, of course, was her main concern. No one had heard a word from him. Where was he now? Was he fighting…or perhaps helping the wounded somehow so he didn’t have to bear arms?

Finally the day arrived, three months after his departure, when Lyndel received her first letter from him. No one could remember her being that excited about anything. And even though the letter was not very forthcoming as to his duties, it at least assured her that he was safe…for now.

She realized too that the longer he stayed with the Union Army and the longer he refrained from returning to the Amish in a repentant spirit, the more likely it was that he would be banned from the church.

Her prayers continued to range from protection to repentance to his quick return home. But as the months passed and occasional letters continued to arrive, Lyndel faced the truth that Nathaniel must be far from repentant for his actions.

Her concern was made all the more real by the sad glances her father gave her when she mentioned Nathaniel at the table. And then finally,
in the spring of 1862, she found herself walking to the Sunday service in their barn dreading what was about to happen. But no matter what was said today, she had made a decision. She would first talk to Levi and then she would begin to make her plans.

She sat down beside her mother and immediately bent her head and moved her lips, silently praying for Nathaniel and Corinth. They had both been in the army almost a year. How she missed Nathaniel. It had become intolerable.
Please, Lord, bring us together again. Somehow. Either he comes to me or I go to him.
She opened her eyes and lifted her head as the singing of hymns began. And then when the singing was finished, she sat and waited anxiously as her father rose and moved to the front of the gathered people and began his sermon.

“So now it is April again,” he said. “Do you remember how it was last year, with our Lord greening the earth, when news came of the assault on Fort Sumter? Do you remember how men chose to fight rather than to pray? To kill rather than to forgive? To make war rather than find the pathway to peace?”

Lyndel’s father paused. She could see the shine of tears at the edges of his eyes and reached over to grip her mother’s hand.

“How very hard this is for him,” whispered her mother. “Remember that.”

“I know, Mother. I hold nothing against him.”

“Are you sure?”

“I harbor no ill feelings, I promise you.”

People all around them, seated in the Keim barn on rough benches, waited while the bishop closed his eyes to pray. Then he spread his hands. Light from cracks in the barn walls glistened on his damp cheeks.

“It is never too late to return to Christ’s fold. Though we may err, there is always forgiveness with our God and with his people. The gate is never shut to the broken and contrite of heart.” He turned to look behind him briefly. “It was here that Moses Gunnison and Charlie Preston took shelter.” Then he gazed over everyone’s heads as if he could see the pasture and creek and sugar maples through the open barn doors. “It was among the maples by the stream that men took Charlie
Preston’s life from him. The rope hangs from the tree yet. I have never removed it.” His eyes fell on the people with a sudden fierceness. “But they could not take his life from God. The Lord holds Charlie’s soul close to his heart. No man can take Charlie from the God of heaven and earth.”

Amen,
murmured dozens of men and women, including Lyndel and her mother.

“We do not pray for God’s creatures to be enslaved. We pray for them to be free to follow the Lord’s will for their lives. But God has called us to be Amish. And the Amish do not free men by killing other men. The Amish will not add more grief to the homes of Northern families or Southern families. We heal. We bless. We comfort. The Amish of America believe God cares for and loves all Americans, regardless of their color or creed or the sins they commit. Always with the Lord Jesus Christ there is mercy, there is hope, there is peace for the turmoil of the human heart and the tumult of nations.”

Briefly he picked up a newspaper and let it fall down upon the clean straw.

“News comes of a terrible battle near Shiloh in Tennessee. Tens of thousands dead and wounded. Mothers in tears. Fathers’ spirits broken. Some of you ask me why I bother to read the papers when the burden they put on a man is so pernicious. My brothers in Christ, my sisters in Christ, I read them so I know how to pray for our country—not North or South but for our whole country. And to weep with those who weep, as our Lord commanded.”

He nodded at the pastors, who sat near him at a front bench, and they stood up and gathered on both sides of him—Abraham Yoder, Samuel Eby, and Solomon Miller. They knelt as one and folded their hands before them in prayer.

“Corinth King left us to bear arms but he had not yet been baptized, not yet taken his vows.” Her father’s eyes rested on Lyndel. “Nathaniel King, on the other hand, was baptized two years ago. He is one of us. He is Amish.” Her father moved his head to seek out Nathaniel’s parents. “Last year we waited months for confirmation that he had joined
a regiment in Indiana. He himself confirmed he had enlisted by writing to me and confessing it was so.

“Many of you know that he and I wrote back and forth all winter as I endeavored to get him to change his mind, to repent, to return to us a man of prayer and of peace. But he has insisted he feels called to make a whip as Jesus made a whip and is clearing the temple of our nation. When I told him it was not his place to take on the role of our Lord he replied that we had to imitate Christ in all things. I responded that just as Nathaniel could not take on the sins of the world on the Cross so he could not take on the sins of the nation and bear a whip to cleanse the temple that is America. But he has proceeded on his own way. He has forgotten the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ ”

Lyndel saw that her father’s tears were flowing freely now. She heard others begin to cry and a tightness came to her throat. She had sworn there would be no tears on her part but she found she couldn’t stop them and so she bowed her head, raising a small white handkerchief to her face.

“So now the papers from Philadelphia and New York tell us of his Indiana regiment and how Nathaniel performed bravely under fire at Lewinsville in Virginia last fall and how he has been promoted to corporal. I have failed to persuade him to return to the ways we as a people have been called upon by the Lord to follow. So, in grief and with our eyes toward the righteous Judge who weighs the hearts and the motives of all men, I and the leadership…” he paused as if he hoped that somehow it had all been a bad dream and that by wishing it so, he might open his eyes and find a repentant Nathaniel King kneeling in front of him, “must with great regret declare Nathaniel King excommunicated,
exkommuniziert,
from our church. He may not be spoken with. Letters may no longer be written to him or letters received from him. It must be as if he were not alive, so that one day, repentant, he may return to us as one who is alive—a young man joined again to his Amish people and joined to the Lord and Savior of our souls. Amen.”

Amen,
the people responded but Lyndel did not open her mouth.

There were baptisms that day—Sunday, April 13th, 1862—and
Communion and then a huge meal but, as she had done the day of Charlie Preston’s funeral, Lyndel wandered off alone to the hay fields near her farm, fields where the grass was short and green and wet from spring rains. And, as Nathaniel had followed her into those fields the year before, she was followed again, this time by her brother Levi, who caught up with her and stood just behind her, calling her name and waiting for her to turn.

When he saw her white face and swollen eyes he removed his broad-brimmed hat. “I’m sorry, Lyndel. This is not much of a day.”

She didn’t greet her brother but merely asked, “What does your newspaper friend from Elizabethtown tell you?”