Prologue
October 2, 2006

DUTCH MEADOWS was the name on the milk truck he drove through Amish country. Chilled, cream-topped bottles clacking like muffled bells as he turned onto the access road. It was morning, October, sweat under his gloves as he knocked on the door of the one-room schoolhouse, and when the teacher, mull-capped, in her dress of plain violet, opened the door, he asked if a clevis pin went missing, if it had been stolen. This teacher said, “No, I don’t know what you mean,” and then he covered her pale lips with his glove and ordered the girls inside not to move. He took the boys to collect lumber, rope, wires, chains, eye hooks, nails, clothespins, toilet paper, candles, and plastic ties from his truck. In the time they were away, the teacher escaped out the back door. He heard her screaming for someone to call for help. Waving his Springfield, he sent one of the boys to catch her, and he lined ten girls along the chalkboard, shouting for each to kneel, and he pressed the nose of his gun to the temple of one, sighting through the eight heads he had chosen, sparing some to bear witness to their wounds. Not a desk or chair or wall untouched by blood, bullet, glass.

Chapter 1
EMMA WALSH 
Spring 2018

Twelve years after the shooting, I started this, my diary, on the backs of old feed calendars. Now there seems no end to my words. Stacks of pages bound together with string.

Each time I write, I hear the voices of that morning. Feel the warm sunlight on my face. Hear Teacher Martha ringing the bell after recess. See my bare legs dangling under my cape dress.

I can’t tell anyone because we aren’t allowed to keep diaries. Hochmut, Mother would say. Pride under the Ordnung.

Mother says I am to forgive the man. She says remembering lets the evil live on. That we should turn our questions to the Lord Father.

I want to tell Mother I am trying. Want to ask her if Beth still haunts her dreams. Does she see my sister in everything like I do? In my hairpins and dolls. My bare feet in the grass. Hear her laugh in the mornings before school? Smell her in the spring peonies and summer bee balm.

But Mother wasn’t there that day. To hear the whisper of Beth’s voice, Take me first, her head covering in line with the man’s heavy gun, black and shining while she knelt.

Mother insists on Martyrs Mirror in times of doubt. Stories of the Holy ones who sacrificed themselves for Christ. Andrew the Apostle crucified at Patras. Geleyn the Shoemaker tortured and burned. Pelagius of Córdova whose limbs were severed. Dirk Willems burned at the stake after saving his captor from drowning.

We must think no evil of the man who took Beth away. As long as we are humble before God, Mother says, we are saved. She reminds me of Corinthians. Remember, any woman who prays or prophesies with her hair uncovered dishonors her head. The head of every man is Christ; the head of a woman is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.

Isaac and I are on our Rumspringa year. We can drink and smoke and play rock and roll to try out the English world, but when we marry, we’ll be baptized, and there’s no going back. Lettie Ames, Isaac’s mother, and mine, Ruth, are already busy making quilts and collecting dishware from our families. Father will carve us a wooden clock to keep in our parlor when we start our lives.

Isaac is more interested in English parties than I am. In drinking Yuengling and listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival by the bonfire. I don’t know what the point is if it’s temporary. Isaac works at an English lumberyard, sawing wood, while I clean and garden for the doctor’s wife, Mrs. Caldwell, on Tuesdays. I’ve been coming since May because I must. My brother Eli has a genetic disease, and Mother and Father need my help to pay for Dr. Caldwell’s treatments. Isaac says I should use my money to buy a cell phone. He wants to call me since we are courting. He takes pictures of us kissing by the covered bridge. Selfies for an album on his phone.

When we’re young, we’re told to fear the camera’s flash, the gaze of sinners. When we’re young and at the market selling our baked goods, our embroidery and quilts, we cross our wrists, covering our faces before the lens. Yet we depend on the English money for our goods. We need English money to live.

Today is Tuesday, and I’m wearing my new orthopedic shoes. I dressed plain, because I prefer it this way—my cape dress with an extra layer of fabric over the bust, my hair covering a half-inch thick, pinned tight, my stockings thirty deniers like Mother wears even in the summer. Mother says we must be witnesses wherever we go, so when people look at us they see God.

But some girls on Rumspringa, like Rachel Yoder and Esther Zimmerman, won’t comply. They hem their dresses above their knees, show extra straps because they can. The only thing I could do without is the shoes. They’re sturdy enough for walking two miles from our farm to the Caldwells’ house on Butter Road, but they’re bulky and warm.

Mrs. Caldwell thinks the distance is too great after a long day, that I must be tired. I don’t tell her I’d prefer to tend her house barefoot, nor that, even with the shoes, walking clears my head.

I’ll drive you home, she frequently offers, tapping the forecast on the narrow rectangle of her phone. Once I agreed because it was raining, but otherwise I prefer to walk.

Three weeks already that I’ve been housekeeping for Mrs. Caldwell. She can’t be much older than Mother, her hair long and silken down her back. She wears a sun hat in her garden, and through the window, I see the light catching on the straw the way it used to with Beth’s braids in an open field. Thoughts I’m not to think. I turn my attention to the rhythms of work to empty my mind. Never miss a crumb in the kitchen. No smudges on the chinaware. No film on the windows.

In the living room, I dust a black television screen. When I catch my reflection, my eyes look like a stain.

I never mean to see myself, but it happens sometimes. I beg God for pardon. Same as I do for reading Mrs. Caldwell’s books of poems when she isn’t looking.

One is We Women by Edith Södergran. Poems about joy and longing, about loneliness. A silence rests. . . . a whispering lying in wait. I murmur the words aloud, wishing they were my own.

This Tuesday, after my work is finished, Mrs. Caldwell brings out a turntable and lifts the clear top. Its pointed spindle shines as she lowers a disc in place. I set down my lemon spray, my handsewn cloths.

“Heard one of these?” she asks. A thin crackle, then slowly, soft music fills the room. “Verdi’s Requiem,” she says.

The music is hushed, sung in a language I’ve never heard. Sweet and full as a winter slumber.

“I have other records too.” She pulls out a handful of thin squares from the cabinet, lying them flat on the floor.

“The dust sleeve,” she says, slipping out the disc. Tissue crinkles. “Each track of the album starts on a groove. You count the grooves to know which track you’re on.”

When she hands the cover to me, she points to number two. Eleanor Rigby, it reads.

“Count the grooves,” she says, and I do. Mrs. Caldwell stops the first record and sets the new one on. “Now you try,” she says, looking at the needle.

I freeze — I won’t touch anything electric; not a dishwasher or stove or car — and she understands.

“No trouble,” she says. “The Beatles.” She points to the faces on the record cover. “They are the real English.” She laughs, but I don’t understand the joke.

When the song plays, it’s not a woman’s voice she hears, but a man’s. He sings loudly, his voice low. There is the sound of drums, of popping.

“Stop.” I cover my ears. “Stop it!”

“What?” Mrs. Caldwell says. “What’s wrong?”

It happens sometimes: the wrong sound or vibration, and I forget where I am. The beat of helicopter blades, the police shouting. The first time, I woke to Mother pressing a cool cloth to my forehead. Eli was still a healthy baby then, swaddled in his blue jumper.

“If you want to, you can tell me,” Mrs. Caldwell says. Then she offers to make tea. A little later the room comes back into focus, and when the kettle hisses in the kitchen, Mrs. Caldwell returns with two mugs, steaming with the scent of peppermint. On the sofa, she sips her tea slowly, and I do the same. After a while, she says, “I won’t tell anyone. You can talk to me.”

It’s like I’m never here, I want to say. Like I’m watching myself live instead of living. Instead, I say, “I miss my sister.” This single word, sister, and the ripple of feeling expands.

“What’s her name?” Mrs. Caldwell’s eyes grow soft.

“Beth.” I wipe my eyes. But it feels good to have spoken.

Mrs. Caldwell sets down her mug. “Don’t worry. We all need to talk to someone. It’s how we get better.” She pauses. “I should take you home.”

“No,” I say. “Please, it’s still early. Mother will worry I’m short on wages.”

“All right then,” she says. “I could use some help with the new trellis.”

In the garden, we tend to the rosebush. When we finish trimming, I tie the canes along the trellis. Mrs. Caldwell wants to weave the roses through the trellis holes.

“It’s best to let them alone,” I say.

“You’re right. Let nature do her work.” Mrs. Caldwell smiles like Mother rarely does, at least in private. She seems happy.

Dusk is setting in. Reason enough for a ride home. When she parks in our driveway, Mrs. Caldwell reaches into her pocketbook. She hands me the envelope, along with her phone number on a slip.

“If you need anything, please call me. You have a telephone, for emergencies?” Her lipstick is red winterberry. “I won’t tell the doctor,” she says. “Not if you don’t want me to.”

“Thank you.” I take the note from her. After the milkman, we got a corded telephone in the shanty. Mother doesn’t want one inside our home, even to call the doctor, because phones are machines, just as guns are. “See you on Tuesday,” I say.

There’s a little breeze, and our porch swing rocks in the gray light. Mother has set out new window boxes with yellow geraniums. In the mornings, before school, she prays by them. May the Lord let his face shine upon you and be gracious to you, may the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

By the front door, I turn, not wanting to go in right away. Mrs. Caldwell waves before backing out. Mother probably needs more jam, strawberry and rhubarb, Eli’s favorite. Out back, I lift the cellar door and go down to collect the jars. I light a candle, take off my shoes, press my bare feet onto the cold concrete floor. The front of the feed calendar has Father’s handwriting, numbers for the day of the week, the amount of seed for the chickens in grams. I find an empty space along the back, press my pencil in.

Before the milkman came, Beth and I collected our feed in early October. We knew how to separate the grain from the chaff. How to winnow the sheaves in the barn. We left the doors open so the chaff could blow away in the breeze, leaving behind the grain. We filled the sacks, Beth and I, carried them and emptied them into the elevator with Mother and Father. We listened to the grain fall down the chute, filling the emptiness.

Twelve years ago, I didn’t know it would be the last time we would. That I would watch Beth’s golden hair in the barn, not knowing it was precious. That I would laugh with her for the last time over the sound of fallen seed.

Now I think of my heart like a grain elevator, my words spilling through the mesh, the wire.

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On October 2, 2006, the community of Nickel Mines received national attention after a lone gunman took 10 young girls hostage in a one-room Amish schoolhouse. He killed five of them, then, when police officers attempted to enter, he committed suicide. In their grief, the Amish community responded with reconciliation and forgiveness.  This was the inspiration for Jaclyn Gilbert’s novel, Butter Road. The novel moves across three perspectives surrounding the event — insiders and outsiders — to understand its larger reverberations on modern society across both Amish and English, or non-Amish, worlds.

Excerpted from Butter Road by Jaclyn Gilbert. Copyright © 2026 by Jaclyn Gilbert. Reprinted by permission of Acre Books. All rights reserved.
Cover art designed by Barbara Neely. Cornfield #3, lumen print by Sarah Crofts, reproduced with permission of the artist. 
Photographs courtesy of Sam McFarland and Jonas Jacobsson, Vanessa Dyste and Unlimited Access on Unsplash.