Tara of Hawthorne's Hope

By Murray Pura

Tara with her gleaming hair, uncut hair, hair the color of hard, white spring wheat. The bones of her face carefully sculpted and polished from birth. Her lips too red, lips she didn't want. A pretty face she didn't want, hating her reflection when she caught it in panes of glass or mirrors in stores. A slender body she could live with so long as others could ignore it, which apparently was an impossible hope. The boys always wanted to court her, arriving in their buggies to escort her to Sunday night hymn sings. She felt like putting potato sacks over her face and body and walking everywhere in her brother Samuel's clunky work boots.

 

An Amish woman who does not want the beauty God has given her. Who does not look forward to the love of a man in her life. Who stares up at the ancient house on the hill with its secrets and darkness, keeping its spirit at bay with prayer and faith. Tara, who is content to wander the fields and meadows of her family farm before dawn each morning and walk with Father God the rest of her life. Until one day a stranger comes to town, joins her Amish church, and opens up his own smithy to care for the blacksmithing need of the community.

 

Him she finds she cannot avoid.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MillerWords, LLC
• Release date: Apr 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9798223658337

Murray Pura

I'm born Canadian, live in the blue Canadian Rockies, sound Canadian when I talk (sort of) ... but I'm really an international guy who has traveled the world by train and boat and plane and thumb ... and I've lived in Scotland, the Middle East, Italy, Ireland, California and, most recently, New Mexico. I write in every fiction genre imaginable because I'm brimming over with stories and I want to get them out there to share with others ... romance, Amish, western, fantasy, action-adventure, historical, suspense ... I write non-fiction too, normally history, biography and spirituality. I've won awards for my novels ZO and THE WHITE BIRDS OF MORNING and have celebrated penning bestselling releases like THE WINGS OF MORNING, THE ROSE OF LANCASTER COUNTY, A ROAD CALLED LOVE and ASHTON PARK. My latest publications include BEAUTIFUL SKIN (spring 2017), ALL MY BEAUTIFUL TOMORROWS (summer 2017), GETTYSBURG (Christmas 2018), RIDE THE SKY (spring 2019), A SUN DRENCHED ELSEWHERE (fall 2019), GRACE RIDER (fall 2019) and ABIGAIL’S CHRISTMAS MIRACLE (Christmas 2019). My novels ZO, RIDE THE SKY and ABIGAIL’s CHRISTMAS MIRACLE are available as audiobooks as well. Please browse my extensive list of titles, pick out a few, write a review and drop me a line. Thanks and cheers!

Book preview

Murray Pura’s Amish Titles with MillerWords

The Bride from Virginia City (eBook edition)

The Rose of Lancaster County (eBook edition)

A Road Called Love (eBook edition)

Grace Rider (paperback & eBook)

Abigail’s Christmas Miracle (paperback, eBook, audiobook)

Ride the Sky (paperback, eBook, audiobook)

Hong Kong Amish (paperback, eBook)

All My Beautiful Tomorrows (paperback, eBook)

Kingfisher Cross

(paperback, eBook, a collection of Amish stories & Englisch stories)

Tara of Hawthorne Hope (paperback, eBook)

Portions of the following poems by Robert Frost are included in this book. All these poems are in the public domain.

A Line-Storm Song

Acquainted with the Night

After Apple Picking

An Old Man’s Winter Night

Come In

Dust of Snow

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy evening

The Road Not Taken

AUTHOR’S NOTE

A new development in a number of Amish communities is the utilization of solar energy. Solar panels heat and light homes, barns, tool sheds and blacksmith shops in some locations.

David Mullett is a member of the Old Order Amish church in Ohio and owns a shop for electric bikes or e-bikes. His shop itself is serviced by two dozen solar panels on the roof. The e-bikes Amish purchase and use are charged by much smaller solar panels the bikes can plug into.

All this is energy is powered by the sun and is completely off the grid.

This becomes part of the story in Hawthorne Hope.

For Linda

always

God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing forth in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley.

Deuteronomy 8:7

Part One

Hawthorne Forge

PROLOGUE

She knew a great deal about Valley Forge.

After all, it was the only other place in America that had the name Forge. So, even as a youth, Tara Friesen had been eager to find out what she could. The American Army, what was left of it, had hidden away there from December 1777 until June 1778. Her Amish schoolteacher, Sister Schultz, had made sure her students, none older than fourteen or fifteen, understood the suffering war could cause, so did not neglect the American Revolution. Or the persecution inflicted upon the Amish for not choosing sides or bearing arms in that conflict. She instructed them in what General Washington, his men, and his women went through to try to create a country free of the kind of tyranny and oppression the forebears of the Miller Amish had endured in Europe.

In her notebook, Tara had copied what Washington had written about his troops marching into Valley Forge, and kept the notebook long after her school years had ended.

To see men without clothes to cover their nakedness, without blankets to lay on, without shoes by which their marches might be traced by the blood from their feet, and almost as often without provisions as with; marching through frost and snow and at Christmas taking up their winter quarters within a day's march of the enemy, without a house or hut to cover them till they could be built, and submitting to it without a murmur is a mark of patience and obedience which in my opinion can scarce be paralleled.

The Quakers had built Mount Joy Iron Forge, what became Valley Forge, in 1742, her notes read. It was about twenty miles north by west of Philadelphia. Just as was the way of things at Hawthorne Forge, the countryside round about Iron Forge was fertile and used to sow crops – in the Quakers’ case, rye, wheat, and Indian corn, while others raised sheep, cattle, and pigs as well. There had been German and Swiss farmers too. Iron Forge became Valley Forge. The only differences were that the Forge where Tara lived was in Upper Michigan, her town had been founded by Calvinists in 1790, and it had never seen warfare, praise the Father God.

Tara always thought of Calvinists as The Witch People because of what they’d done in Salem (something she’d discovered on her own). Fortunately, it had been Scottish Calvinists whom founded Hawthorne Forge, not the English Calvinists of Massachusetts Bay. The Scots named it after one of their blacksmiths and frontiersmen. They soon moved on from the foundry where she now lived. Eventually they were replaced by scores of Amish moving west from Pennsylvania for land and elbow room. Tara knew they’d never used that expression, but she liked it, because as a girl she’d been dazzled by Daniel Boone’s exploits. She loved to read about them when she could (sometimes with the book under her pillow).

As for the rest of it, well, she knew Jakob Amman had been a Mennonite bishop in Europe who wanted his people to be stricter Mennonites. He felt Mennonites were becoming too carnal and worldly. Bishop Amman was especially passionate about excommunication and shunning. Not everyone liked his sternness though. So, there was a church split. The people who followed him became known as Amish after his family name Amman.

Tara liked being Amish, but she had never liked Jakob Amman’s rigidity or his judgmental attitude. Thank the Father God the Miller Amish were far more gracious, loving, and forgiving than him.

She adored the name Hawthorne Forge.

Chapter 1

The land was wide and it spread far, as far as centuries, as far as sky. Centuries – she had found two arrowheads since she turned seven. Sky – there was always sky, dove gray or Steller’s Jay blue, there never stopped being sky or land.

The land was not flat. It rolled like breakers rolled in the winds on the Great Lakes. Undulated like a Yellow Warbler in flight – up and down, up and down, yet still moving forward without a pause for, like the bird, it had a purpose. And, like the songbird, with its feathers of green and yellow, the moving land had the fresh green of newborn timothy and the sunniest yellow of canola. Its colors and its soil were its wings.

Come be my love in the wet woods, come where the boughs rain when it blows.

She smiled as she remembered the line from Robert Frost. The poetry no one knew she read, the old paperback found in a ditch on the land, dirty, torn, but part of the land because the ditch and its dirt were part of the land. Just as rain and wet were part of the land, for without rain, there could be no land, and without the Robert Frosts, no one could talk about the land in the way it should be talked about and honored.

God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing forth in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley.

The day was new. So new it was bright and shiny as the silver war nickels Grandpa Friesen had told her about. Or even as bright as the back in the day dimes he’d dug from his pocket to show her, dated 1954 or 1957 or 1961 – almost one hundred percent silver. New days were just like them if the days could be clearly seen, absent of gray clouds. For the east was always a shining line of silver if the sun had anything to say about it.

Holy words spoke of the early morning. She had her own way of rendering verses from the German Bible. My soul pines for the Lord, she whispered, quoting the Psalter and adding her unique embellishments, more than watchmen pine for the morning, much more than watchmen pine for the morning.

The hour was well before the east’s shine. This was her moment and, she knew, the moment of many others who liked the early things and the fresh things. Things unspoiled and newly made. Like a calf or lamb birthed. Like a foal. Like bread set out to cool. Or water pumped into her hands and splashed to her face cold. Like a sudden storm – and the Father God knew she loved storms.

There was not a great deal for Tara Friesen to do at four in the morning. She walked and prayed regardless of the season. It was better for her to move about when she looked at Father God. She was not good with pews or chairs. Mama called Tara, my restless spirit.

Tara with her gleaming hair, uncut hair, hair the color of hard, white spring wheat. The bones of her face carefully sculpted and polished from birth. Her lips too red, lips she didn’t want. A pretty face she didn’t want, hating her reflection when she caught it in panes of glass or mirrors in stores. A slender body she could live with so long as others could ignore it, which apparently was an impossible hope. The boys always wanted to court her, arriving in their buggies to escort her to Sunday night hymn sings. She felt like putting potato sacks over her face and body and walking everywhere in her brother Samuel’s clunky work boots.

Face or no face, no one but Father God saw it in the brief moments that were the split between day and night. The day is yours and yours also the night. It was the best time of the day though she felt there were many bests – sunrise, and sunset, and moonrise being another three of them. And it was a good thing too because later in the day, and this day in July in particular, things were not so great.

Nineteen, baptized Amish at sixteen, used to handling horses since she was ten or maybe nine, Tara had no problem taking the buggy into town, with Jake’s Moon in harness, to do some shopping for the family. She had her list penciled in German. Everyone wanted something. This was a good. It was meeting up with the other young women of the Miller Amish that was so frustrating.

To her mind, they were all taking gibberish in a mixture of English and Low German. Such a noisy tangle in front of Zook’s Grocery with its old screen door and diagonal red Coca-Cola bar across it. A gaggle in long black or long navy dresses. The new blacksmith this, the new blacksmith that, on and on, like a pack of schoolgirls.

What is the matter, Tara? asked Rachel Hostetler. Why so cross? Did the wrong side of the bed not please you this morning?

I’m fine, Tara replied. I’m just in a hurry.

To do what? To get where? Perhaps you have an errand to run at the blacksmith’s?

The young women laughed loudly together. Happy, merry and, so far as Tara was concerned, raucous and silly.

She did have something she needed to do at the new blacksmith’s, but she had no intention of admitting that.

I have no need or desire to go and see the new blacksmith she replied.

Nein?

Nein.

We’ve heard otherwise.

Then you’ve heard wrong, Rachel. God bless you. (You and your wild red hair, that you never seem to be able to pin up properly under your prayer Kapp.)

I’ve heard that too, Elspeth Zook spoke up, a straw blond with her dozens of freckles. (Freckles like hot pepper seeds, tightening on the bridge of her nose the sillier she grew.) Apparently, you need a number of things for the house and the barn, things your family has been waiting to have made since our old blacksmith, Brother Schultz, went on to the Father. So, now a new blacksmith is among us and it is past time.

And what a blacksmith! Lydia King exclaimed with a grin, glancing around at the others. (Ah, if Lydia’s raven hair, glossy as black water at midnight, was only free and unbound, she could toss it as she laughed away in her teasing, taunting way. Lydia would love to be able to show off like that, Tara knew. Lydia, a great beauty, with her sharp bone cuts, and angles, and milk skin that all worked together in perfection.) Perhaps you’ll fancy him, Tara.

Tara was aware she