A Quilt for Jenna Read online

  HARVEST HOUSE PUBLISHERS

  EUGENE, OREGON

  Cover by Garborg Design Works, Savage, Minnesota

  Cover photo © Chris Garborg; author photo by William Craig—Craig Propraphica

  Published in association with the literary agency of the Steve Laube Agency, LLC, 5025 N. Central Ave., #635, Phoenix, Arizona 85912.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A QUILT FOR JENNA

  Copyright © 2013 by Patrick E. Craig

  Published by Harvest House Publishers

  Eugene, Oregon 97402

  www.harvesthousepublishers.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Craig, Patrick E., 1947-

  A quilt for Jenna / Patrick E. Craig.

  p. cm.—(Apple Creek dreams series; bk. 1.)

  ISBN 978-0-7369-5105-0 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978-0-7369-5106-7 (eBook)

  1. Quiltmakers—Fiction. 2. Traffic accidents—Fiction. 3. Amish—Ohio—Fiction.

  4. Foundlings—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3603.R3554Q55 2013

  813'.6—dc23

  2012026072

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  To my daughter Cheryl and my granddaughter Terra Lynn

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To my wonderful wife, Judy, for her tireless proofing and editing work on the first six drafts of this book and her ceaseless prayer on its behalf.

  To Dan Kline for his initial editing of this book, his great suggestions and input, and his invaluable friendship.

  To Sue Tornai for keeping me in the active voice.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  A Note from Patrick Craig

  The First Day

  Chapter One: The Quilt

  Chapter Two: Bobby

  Chapter Three: The Crash

  The Second Day

  Chapter Four: The Journey Begins

  Chapter Five: The Storm

  Chapter Six: Apple Creek

  Chapter Seven: Deep Roots

  Chapter Eight: Reuben

  Chapter Nine: Changes

  Chapter Ten: Troubles

  Chapter Eleven: Henry

  Chapter Twelve: Summer Dreams

  Chapter Thirteen: The Heart of the Beast

  The Third Day

  Chapter Fourteen: Missing

  Chapter Fifteen: The Trouble with Reuben

  Chapter Sixteen: Friends

  Chapter Seventeen: A Quilt for…

  Chapter Eighteen: Hard Choices

  Chapter Nineteen: Trials and Tests

  Chapter Twenty: Looking Up

  Chapter Twenty-One: Into the Storm

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Contact

  Chapter Twenty-Three: The Battle of the Ridge

  Chapter Twenty-Four: The Journey Home

  Chapter Twenty-Five: The Decision

  Chapter Twenty-Six: The Shadow of His Wings

  The Fourth Day

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Die Heilberührung

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: When Johnny Comes Marching Home

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Reunion

  Chapter Thirty: Wedding Day

  Chapter Thirty-One: To Every Thing There Is a Season

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Jenna

  Chapter Thirty-Three: A Test of Faith

  Chapter Thirty-Four: Goodbye, My Darling Girl

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Flight into Darkness

  Chapter Thirty-Six: A Place to Hide

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: A New Day

  The Fifth Day

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: To Seek and Save the Lost

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: I Once Was Lost…

  Chapter Forty: …But Now I’m Found

  Chapter Forty-One: Going Home

  Epilogue

  Discussion Questions

  About Patrick E. Craig

  A Note from Patrick Craig

  APPLE CREEK IS A REAL PLACE. It is a village set in the heart of Wayne County, Ohio, eleven miles from Dalton and ten miles from Wooster. It has real streets and real people.

  Apple Creek and the surrounding area are home to a large Amish community and have been since the mid-1800s. Not far to the east lies Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where the Amish first settled in America in 1720.

  I chose Apple Creek as the setting for A Quilt for Jenna while doing research on the Amish in Ohio and in particular on Amish quilt makers. Apple Creek, Dalton, and Wooster are known for the marvelous Amish quilts produced there. Dalton has one of the biggest quilting fairs in Ohio.

  A town named Apple Creek was just too good to pass up as a location, so I started my story there. I used the actual streets and highways, the localities, and even local family names in A Quilt for Jenna even though all the characters are fictitious and not based on real people.

  As I mentally planted myself in the heart of Apple Creek, the characters in the book began to spring out of the earth, fully grown, with lives and stories, joys and sorrows. The story was easy to write because it seemed as though I were reading someone’s journal as I wrote it.

  The more I explored Apple Creek, the more I realized how connected I was to the village. My great-great-grandfather, Anthony Rockhill, was born forty-nine miles from Apple Creek in Alliance, Ohio, in 1828. Apple Creek is eighty-five miles from the site of Fort Henry, West Virginia, on the Ohio River. Fort Henry was the site of Betty Zane’s run for life during the British and Indian siege during the Revolutionary War in 1782. The book Betty Zane by Zane Grey was a childhood favorite and still has a place on my bookshelf.

  As a child I poured over stories about Lewis Wetzel and Jonathan Zane and followed them through the trackless Ohio wilderness only a few miles from what would become the village of Apple Creek. Though I’ve never been there, I feel I know the area like the back of my hand. And so it was no coincidence that I came to choose Apple Creek. Though the characters in this book are fictional, they have become very real to me, as I hope they will become to you.

  And by the way, the horrific storm in A Quilt for Jenna is also real. Historians have called it the Great Appalachian Storm or even the Blizzard of the Century. At the time, of course, the people who lived in the path of this monster didn’t have a name for it. They just hunkered down and tried to endure it.

  I hope the story of Jerusha Springer and her struggle to survive will touch a place in your heart as you read. Perhaps something of your own life will be changed for the better by the end of the book. So as I think about it, maybe it was coincidence that I chose Apple Creek. After all, coincidence is just God choosing to remain anonymous.

  The First Day

  WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1950

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Quilt

  JERUSHA SPRINGER REACHED BEHIND the quilting frame with her left hand and pushed the needle back to the surface of the quilt to complete her final stitch. Wearily she pulled the needle through, quickly knotted the quilting thread, and broke it off.

  Finished at last. She leaned back and let out a sigh of satisfaction. It had taken months to complete, but here it was—the finest quilt she had ever made.

  Thousands of stitches had gone into the work, seventy every ten inches, and now the work was finished. It had been worth it. The quilt was a masterpiece. Her masterpiece...and Jenna’s.

  She grabbed a tissue and quickly wiped
away an unexpected tear.

  If only Jenna were here with me, I could bear this somehow.

  But Jenna wasn’t there. Jenna was gone forever.

  Jerusha glanced out the window as the November sun shone weakly through a gray overcast of clouds. The pale light made the fabric in the quilt shimmer and glow. A fitful wind shook the bare branches of the maple trees, and the few remaining leaves whirled away into the light snow that drifted down from the gunmetal sky.

  Winter had come unannounced to Apple Creek, and Jerusha hadn’t noticed. Her life had been bound up in this quilt for so many months—since Jenna’s death, really—that everything else in her life seemed like a shadow. She stared at the finished quilt on the frame, but there was no joy in her heart, only a dull ache and the knowledge that soon she would be free.

  She had searched without success for several months to find just the right fabric to make this quilt, and then she stumbled upon it quite by accident. A neighbor told her of an estate sale at an antique store in Wooster, and she asked Henry, the neighbor boy, to drive her over to see what she could find. The Englisch had access to many things from the outside world, and she had often looked in their stores and catalogs to find just the right materials for her quilting.

  On that day in Wooster she had been poking through the piles of clothing and knickknacks scattered around the store when she came upon an old cedar chest. The lid was carved with ornate filigree, and several shipping tags were still attached. The trunk was locked, so she called the proprietor over, and when he opened it, she drew in her breath with a little gasp. There, folded neatly, were two large pieces of fabric. One was blue—the kind of blue that kings might wear—and as she lifted it to the light, she could see that it seemed to change from blue to purple, depending on how she held it. The other piece was deep red...like the blood of Christ or perhaps a rose.

  The fabric was light but strong, smooth to the touch and tightly woven.

  “I believe that’s genuine silk, ma’am,” the owner said. “I’m afraid it’s going to be expensive.”

  Jerusha didn’t argue the price. It was exactly what she was looking for, and she didn’t dare let it slip through her fingers. Normally, the quilts that she and the other women in her community made were from plainer fabric, cotton or sometimes synthetics, but lately she didn’t really care about what the ordnung said.

  So, pushing down her fear of the critical comments she knew she would hear from the other women about pride and worldliness, she purchased it and left the store. As she rode home, the design for the quilt began to take form in her mind, and for the first time since Jenna’s death, she felt her spirits lift.

  When she arrived home, she searched through her fabric box for the cream-colored cotton backing piece she had reserved for this quilt. She then sketched out a rough design and in the following days cut the hundreds of pieces to make the pattern for the top layer. She sorted and ironed them and then pinned and stitched all the parts into a rectangle measuring approximately eight and a half feet by nine feet. After that she laid the finished top layer out on the floor and traced the entire quilting design on the fabric with tailor’s chalk. The design had unfolded before her eyes as if someone else were directing her hand. This quilt was the easiest she had ever pieced together.

  The royal blue pieces made a dark, iridescent backdrop to a beautiful deep red rose-shaped piece in the center. The rose had hundreds of parts, all cut into the flowing shapes of petals instead of the traditional square or diamond-shaped patterns of Amish quilts. Though the pattern was the most complicated she had ever done, she found herself grateful that it served as a way to keep thoughts of Jenna’s absence from overwhelming her.

  Next she laid out the cream-colored backing, placed a double layer of batting over it, and added the ironed patchwork piece she had developed over the past month.

  On her hands and knees she carefully basted the layers together, starting from the center and working out to the edges. Once she was finished, she called Henry for help. He held the material while she carefully attached one end to the quilting frame, and then they slowly turned the pole until she could attach the other end. After drawing the quilt tight until it was stable enough to stitch on, she started to quilt. Delicate tracks of quilting stitches began to make their trails through the surface of the quilt as Jerusha labored day after day at her work. The quilt was consuming her, and her despair and grief and the anger she felt toward God for taking Jenna were all poured into the fabric spread before her.

  Often as she worked she stopped and lifted her face to the sky.

  “I hate You,” she would say quietly, “and I’m placing all my hatred into this quilt so I will never forget that when I needed You most, You failed me.” Then she would go back to her work with a fierce determination and a deep and abiding anger in her heart.

  And now at last the quilt was finished—her ticket out of her awful life.

  “I will take this quilt to the Dalton Fair, and I will win the prize,” she said aloud. “Then I will leave Apple Creek, and I will leave this religion, and I will leave this God who has turned His back on me. I will make a new life among the Englisch, and I will never return to Apple Creek.”

  She stared at the quilt. I will call this quilt the Rose of Sharon. Not for You, but for her, my precious girl, my Jenna. The quilt shone in the soft light from the window, and Jerusha felt a great surge of triumph.

  I don’t need You—not now, not ever again.

  And Jerusha turned off the lamp and went alone to her cold bed.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Bobby

  BOBBY HALVERSON STOOD in the rolled-up doorway of the diesel repair shop, smoking a Camel and watching the gray storm clouds blowing in from the south. The wind carried a biting chill, and flurries of snow had become a steady fall. Behind him in the shop, Dutch Peterson was complaining out loud as he worked on Bobby’s old tractor.

  “These glow plugs are shot, Bobby! Only three give me enough current to start it up. And the compression release is jamming up. If you get stuck out in the cold and she sits for a while, you’re going to have a heck of a time startin’ ’er up again.”

  “Well, can you get me some new plugs, Dutch?” Bobby tossed away his cigarette and came back into the shop.

  Dutch had parts spread all over the place and was knocking dirt out of the air cleaner as he continued his grumbling. “This old hunk-a-junk belongs in the junkyard.”

  “Come on, Dutch, you’ve got to get it going for me. There’s a big storm coming in, and I’m the only plow in Apple Creek. What about all those Amish folks with their buggies? If I don’t keep the roads clear, they’ll get stuck for sure. A lot of people will be on the road tomorrow for Thanksgiving, and it’ll be even worse when they come back home Friday. I’ve got to keep the roads open.”

  “Okay,” Dutch said. “Don’t get all het up. I think I can get you some new plugs by Monday if I can get up to Wooster, but until then you be real careful. Once you get ’er running, don’t let ’er stop, or you’ll be up against it, no joke.”

  Bobby stepped over to the barrel stove that heated the shop and threw another shovelful of coal into the bottom bin. The barrel was already glowing red hot, but it did little to dispel the cold inside the shop. Bobby slapped his arms against his chest and stamped his feet on the concrete floor.

  “Man, it’s freezing cold,” he said. “I bet the temperature’s dropped ten degrees in the last hour. I’m sure glad I had you build that cab on the plow. This wind’s going to get really fierce before the storm is over.”

  Dutch kept about his work, and slowly the parts he had cleaned went back into the old engine. He stopped and held up an injector to the light.

  “Bobby,” he said, “you’re a good-hearted soul, and you help a lot of people, but you don’t know nothin’ about keepin’ this old rig going. You’re dang lucky to have me to help you, because otherwise, this old hoss would have been sitting in a pasture somewhere years ago.”

&nbs
p; “I know, Dutch,” Bobby said, “and I sure do appreciate it. Now, if you don’t mind, maybe you could stop with the jawin’ and get this old hoss back on the road.”

  Bobby Halverson was Apple Creek’s one-man snow-removal department because he had the only plow within about ten miles. In a big storm, the County workers usually concentrated on Wooster and the bigger towns, leaving Apple Creek to fend for itself. He had rigged up the plow on his tractor three years ago with Dutch’s help and had been able to keep the roads mostly clear that year. The locals were so grateful they pooled some money to create a snowplow fund to help Bobby with expenses. It wasn’t a lot, but it helped keep the tractor running and get a few extras, which was nice—especially this year, with Thanksgiving tomorrow.

  Bobby walked back to the open door of the shop and surveyed the sky. The wind was blowing in from western Pennsylvania, and the way it was picking up, along with the big drop in temperature, told Bobby that a humdinger of a nor’easter was coming through. The weatherman on the radio had called it an extratropical cyclone, whatever that meant, and warned about high winds and even tornadoes along the path of the storm. Many of the outlying farms would be snowbound, and there would definitely be some downed power lines and blackouts. So it was critical that Dutch get the old plow in shape because it would be a long haul until Monday.

  Bobby stared out at the street. The wind was gusting and the snow was falling softly on the road. The asphalt still held enough heat to melt off some of the snow, but it wouldn’t be long until the roads were covered and icy. A few cars made their way toward the center of the village, probably headed for the creamery or the grocery store to do some last-minute Thanksgiving shopping.

  “Okay,” Dutch said, “stop your mooning and get over here and crank the starter. Let’s see if we can get ’er going.”

  Bobby jumped up into the covered cab and watched Dutch spray some ether straight into the manifold port. “Crank it!” Dutch yelled, and Bobby turned her over. The old tractor jumped a little and then fired right up. Ka-chug, ka-chug, ka-chug...the old two-stroke engine labored to life.