NICKEL MINES, Pa. - The time has come round again.
Tasseled stalks of corn stand tall and sere in unseasonable heat. In undulating fields, farmers behind horse-drawn plows turn under the remains of the harvest. Handmade signs advertise pumpkins and fresh cider.
In Lancaster County, the pageant of the seasons proceeds; nature keeps its rhythms.
In the play yard of the freshly built New Hope Amish School, boys in suspenders and girls in bonnets play softball. Younger children frolic, blond hair flashing in the sun.
This time last year, many of those children were learning their lessons in a different one-room schoolhouse. Across the road and not far away, four trees are clustered oddly in a verdant meadow. They seem to be standing sentinel for something that no longer exists. Last October, the schoolhouse they once sheltered was demolished, banished like a bad memory. No trace survives of the West Nickel Mines Amish School. Lush grass covers the scars.
Other scars have not been so easy to erase.
A year ago Tuesday, Charles Carl Roberts IV, a local milk-truck driver, calmly entered that schoolhouse and bound and shot 10 girls before killing himself. Five of the girls survived. In suicide notes and last calls to his wife, Roberts, 32, said he was tormented by memories of molesting two young relatives 20 years ago, and that he had never recovered from the death of his first-born child, Elise.
Within hours of this terrible moment, an event that could have fostered despair became marbled with hope as the Amish relied on their traditions and faith to teach lessons of forgiveness, gratitude, resilience and grace.
Four of the five injured girls have been able to resume normal life. The fifth, Rosanna King, who was 6 when she was shot, suffered a severe head injury and is unable to talk. She uses a wheelchair and is dependent on others for basic functions. Some of the boys released by Roberts before the slayings are struggling with survivors' guilt.
Marie Roberts, the widow of the perpetrator, and her three children have moved to a nearby community. Last spring, she remarried.
"She's trying very hard to get on with her life," said the Rev. Kristine Hileman, a Presbyterian minister who became friends with Marie through a prayer group. In June, Marie Roberts "was looking forward to her new life and her new home." Her new husband has two children of his own, Hileman said. "It's a blended family, and they seem to be doing well."
In the crossroads settlement of Nickel Mines, the aptly named New Hope Amish School, a handsome brick-and-frame structure with a jaunty cupola, is a defiant symbol of the community's determination to transcend the trauma and thrive.
"Individuals who were closest to the situation are still quite wounded, and for them, healing will take a lot of time," Hileman said. "But those further removed have moved on with their lives. Mention Oct. 2 and some don't recognize the significance."
The Amish famously avoid publicity, and they are even more protective of their privacy now. The school was closed Monday and will remain closed Tuesday, and there will be no public ceremony or commemorative event. Privately, the Amish will observe the occasion by visiting each other's homes, talking, eating, praying, sharing memories of the departed children, and exchanging cards featuring poems of appreciation.
The way the Amish are handling the anniversary is of a piece with their behavior throughout. F. Scott Fitzgerald once defined style as "an unbroken series of perfect gestures." That could be said of the Amish response. But those gestures, undergirded by faith and moral resolve, surpassed mere style and became displays of grace.
And Grace is the pregnant word in the title of a new book by three scholars of Amish culture about the aftermath of the Nickel Mines slaughter, Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy.
Hours after the shootings, several Amish, acting on their own, walked to the homes of the gunman's widow, parents and parents-in-law to express sympathy and offer forgiveness, by proxy, to the killer. One Amish man held Roberts' sobbing father in his arms, reportedly for as long as an hour, to comfort him. When Roberts was buried, about 30 members of the Amish community attended and mourned. When a local bank set up a fund for the Roberts children, the Amish contributed. The Nickel Mines Accountability Committee, which was organized to handle contributions to the community, gave some of its funds to Marie Roberts.
"Over the centuries, the Amish have learned that hostility destroys harmony and that if there are ill feelings among people, you have to confront them," says Herman Bontrager, an insurance executive who serves as spokesman for the accountability committee. "Forgiveness is a very important part of that. It's a decision that you're not going to let your life be controlled by vengeful thoughts, which are destructive for the self and for the community."
The Amish tradition of forgiveness is "in their cultural DNA," says Donald B. Kraybill, a coauthor of Amish Grace and a professor of Anabaptist and Pietist studies at Elizabethtown College.
"So much of Amish life is about submitting individual will to the will of the group and the will of God," says Steven M. Nolt, a coauthor of Amish Grace and a professor of history at Goshen (Ind.) College. "For them, there's a clear connection between that lifelong process of sacrificing and giving up and what one needs to do in the process of forgiveness - give up grudges and the right to revenge."
In dealing with sorrow, the Amish are helped by distinctive rituals of grieving. As they readily admit, however, they are not saints. They fail and they sin like the rest of us, and they do not want to be put on pedestals. Nor is practicing forgiveness easy.
"The Amish people struggle with this, as well," says David L. Weaver-Zercher, another Amish Grace coauthor and a professor of American religious history at Messiah College in Grantham. "It's too simple to say the Amish forgive and other people don't, but in these kinds of awful situations, they have a habit they fall back on, and that's the habit of seeking to move beyond grief, pain and anger by offering forgiveness."
While researching the book, Kraybill never heard any expression of vengeance toward the killer, he says. "None of the Amish said, 'I hope he rots in hell. I hope God punishes him.' When I asked about that, they said, 'God is the judge. The killer's eternal destiny is in God's hands.' One Amish man said to me: 'I wish for the killer in his eternal destiny the same as I wish for myself,' meaning that he hoped God would be merciful."
Some moved beyond forgiveness to what Kraybill calls "remarkable empathy." A father whose daughter was among the slain said to him, "Can you imagine how painful it must be to be the father of a killer like this? That would be 10 times more painful than what I went through."
Remarks like this cause Kraybill to marvel at the Amish sense of decency. "Remember, these are people with an eighth-grade education," Kraybill says. "They haven't studied moral ethics or philosophy."
But they have studied the Bible, the Amish would reply, and a careful reading of Scripture makes doing the right thing plain.
The early expressions of forgiveness were so spontaneous and seemingly reflexive that some accused the Amish of acting robotically. In fact, some pundits criticized the Amish, claiming that instant forgiveness is inauthentic and unhealthy.
"The Amish would say, 'Yes, we did begin to forgive within hours, but the forgiveness didn't stop there,' " Kraybill says. "It was an ongoing process. They also had deep grief, pain and anguish. It wasn't like their forgiveness was quick and callous, once and done."
That ongoing process built "a bridge of reconciliation," Kraybill says, making it possible for the killer's family to respond in kind. The parents of Charles Roberts have visited the homes of every family with children in the school that day, bringing food and other tokens of friendship, and early this summer they invited all the Amish families over for a picnic.
It seems blasphemous even to suggest that the atrocity at Nickel Mines has a silver lining. Nevertheless, some say it has produced some good.
"The Amish example brought forgiveness to the forefront of our lives," Hileman said. "We have talked about it more and thought about it more. It made me closely examine my own life and ask, 'Who do I need to forgive? And from whom do I need to ask forgiveness?' "
"People are hungry for alternatives to fear and violence," said Bontrager, of the accountability committee. "You can see that by the way the world responded, the generosity and contributions. That is the good that has managed to come out of this."