A Quilt for Jenna Read Online Free PDF Page A

she couldn’t stop the thoughts. While she had been making the quilt she had been intent on her work, and her single-minded determination kept at bay the demons that wanted to devour her soul. She remembered the moment she had finished the quilt.
    Always before, she had followed the Amish tradition of deliberately sewing a mistake into her quilts to avoid offending God with human perfection. But she hadn’t done that this time. This quilt was perfect, and she had made it. If that was a sin, then so be it.
    When she had come to the place where she normally would have sewn a mistake into the patchwork, she had paused. The quilt was stretched tightly on the frame, the beautiful silken fabric glowing in the last rays of light coming through her window. The effect was almost sublime in its perfection, and she had leaned back in her chair to admire her work.
    She remembered how she had broken the last thread of the perfect quilt in defiance, and suddenly a weariness overcame her. Her head nodded as she sat wrapped against the cold in the back of Henry’s car. Her thoughts, once churning like the water in the millrace behind her father’s gristmill, began to still themselves. The days of planning and sewing and hating had taken their toll, and in the cold light of the gathering storm she remembered the days of her happiness...before.

    The days of Jerusha’s childhood had been good days, filled with the comfort of a stable family and the practice of her faith. Her family was Old Order Amish, and she loved the ways of her people. The Hershbergers lived on one of the largest farms in Apple Creek. The family had been in America for more than two hundred years—since the Plain People accepted William Penn’s offer of religious freedom. Even before that, when the first Amish came to Pennsylvania from Switzerland in 1720, the Hershbergers were among them.
    When the Amish moved west in the early 1800s, the Hershberger family had followed, arriving in the village of Apple Creek in 1857. The land was fertile and open, and it greatly suited the Amish folk and their agricultural skills. The Hershberger family had homesteaded a tract of land outside the village, and over the years they had purchased neighboring farms. Now they held more than two hundred acres of the most fertile land in the township, and Hershberger milk and cheese were renowned throughout Wayne County.
    During her childhood, the rest of the nation was suffering through the Great Depression, and the Amish were not sheltered from the turmoil of those years. But the Amish were accustomed to doing more with less. The Hershberger family and their neighbors simply pulled inward and depended on each other, so Jerusha grew up in an atmosphere of love, self-sufficiency, and community. The Amish of Apple Creek remained an island of safety and prosperity in those troubled times.
    Jerusha’s days were filled with the simple tasks of a farm girl—planting in the spring, tending the animals, and cooking for her father and brothers as they harvested the corn and wheat. She watched her grandmother and mother can and preserve the garden produce and put up the fruit for the winter. They filled the root cellar with potatoes, onions, and barrels of apples. Her father brought ice from the winter pond and packed it into the cold house, which was dug into the side of a hill behind the house. Then they prepared hams, chickens, and sides of beef and stored them away for the festive dinners and holiday celebrations that were the hallmarks of her youth.
    Jerusha’s father was an Armendiener , a deacon, and she loved to sit quietly while he read from the Bible during the Sunday meetings. The scriptures came alive to her as he read, and his rich baritone voice soothed her and filled her with a certainty that the God her family served could only be a good and loving God.
    When she was old enough, her father gave her the job of bringing home the milk cows every