Side by Side
In Lancaster County, Two Communities Cross a Bridge

By Tamara Jones
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 5, 2006

PARADISE, Pa., Oct. 4

Morning always had a predictable sound here, a comforting refrain -- the lowing of cows in the dairy barns, the laughter of children hurrying down country lanes, the peal of school bells in the distance.

For the Amish who live in this rolling patch of Lancaster County, the quiet itself was a form of worship, obedience to the biblical command they point to in Romans 12:2. "Be not conformed to this world," the Scripture reads.

And then, on Monday, the sounds of morning suddenly changed.

Glass shattered, guns fired, sirens wailed and wailed.

By the time Charles C. Roberts IV had finished his rampage in the one-room Amish schoolhouse on White Oak Road, five little girls were dead or dying and another five were critically wounded. And two very different worlds collided in ways one couldn't imagine and the other was helpless to prevent.

Now sorrow has become their common ground.

"Actually, I feel closer to English people than I did before," says a 39-year-old Amish farmer on White Oak Road, wheeling home for lunch on a small bicycle. He doesn't want his name used, "for humility's sake." His non-Amish ("English") neighbors had always been friendly, willing to haul things in their trucks for him or such. After the schoolhouse massacre, though, "the English" began dropping by just to talk, to express sympathy even though the farmer's family was not directly affected.

He felt a surge of gratitude when he saw one of those neighbors angrily chase a television crew away when they approached a cluster of Amish children walking home. The determination to protect Amish privacy in the wake of tragedy was fierce all around, it seemed. Police obligingly cordoned off driveways of those not wishing to be disturbed.

The outside world could still effectively be shut out. "We don't read newspapers or have televisions," the farmer explains. "I understand there are video games where you actually shoot people," he says tentatively. "Is that true? If such things do exist, then I fear we're going to see a lot more of this."

But blame and bitterness are nowhere evident in the careful words or uncomfortably public life of the Amish. No hatred is expressed toward the English.

"You had no control over his actions whatsoever," says Sam Fisher, who manages the auction house where Roberts routinely parked his milk truck at shift's end each morning. "This was a sick man. It's not your fault."

For centuries, this has been known as Amish country, even though the 28,000 "plain people" account for a dwindling minority of the sprawling county's population. In enclaves like Paradise, the Amish and their modern neighbors have developed a friendly symbiosis, where SUVs park alongside horse-drawn carriages outside the general store and kids play together regardless of religion.

The Amish girls selling homemade cider and cheese and honey continue to smile and chat with the English who stop by their farmhouse stands, and the bearded men running errands in town patiently answer the questions now posed by reporters from Russia and Japan. Yes, the Amish tell time; pocket watches are permissible but wristwatches are forbidden adornments. Telephones can be in outbuildings but not the house, automobiles and electricity are conveniences best avoided. A dying child can be taken to the hospital by helicopter, but the parents cannot fly. Life support is a matter of individual choice, not religious stricture.

The taxi and van services the Amish usually hire to travel distances too great for horse and buggy immediately offered free transportation to the stricken families, Fisher recounts, ferrying them from hospital to hospital as they searched for their daughters that awful day. The wounded were stabilized at Lancaster General Hospital, then transferred to trauma centers in Philadelphia, Hershey and Delaware. It was the middle of the night by the time one family with wounded sisters in separate hospitals finally made it to the bedside of their dying 7-year-old.

The gestures of support from strangers as well as neighbors left the Amish both grateful and perplexed. Thank you, but no, Sam Fisher found himself telling the companies that called his auction house to offer free refrigerators or gas stoves for the grieving families. He has become the unofficial Amish spokesman.

"People are wanting to send flowers, teddy bears, food," he reports. "What good will a teddy bear do?" His tone is one of puzzlement, not accusation.

And flowers? "Flowers are not part of our funeral custom." It would be far better, he says, for people to donate money to the fund a local bank set up to help defray medical costs. The Amish are self-insured, "and we pay our bills." But he fears the community won't be able to shoulder this financial burden alone.

There's no hunger here for more details about the horror that unfolded at the school. When police agree to escort the media past the yellow crime-scene tape down the hill where the schoolhouse sits amid cornfields and pastureland, no locals gather in hopes of catching a glimpse too.

As the crowd surges down the hill, an Amish family walks through their field across the road from the school, the men's heads bowed beneath their straw hats. They walk on without stopping, without turning to look -- intent, it seems, on moving only forward.

Behind a rusty gate, the cordoned-off school stands, its shattered windows and front door boarded up. A swing set hangs empty in the shade of a maple already turning gold.

Up on the main road, Dave Nissley, a landscaper who lives near several of the Amish families whose children were shot, makes his way through the throng of television cameras and reporters with a jug of fresh-pressed cider and a box of doughnuts. He approaches the journalists one by one with what he describes as a special request. "We're hearing word that that group that protests against homosexuals at funerals is planning to come here," he says. "Please, can we ask you, if they show up, don't give them publicity, don't put their faces on TV. These families don't deserve this."

His children's Amish playmates have been sleeping on his living room floor, Nissley says, while their parents tend to friends who lost two daughters in the massacre. "We're part of each other's lives," he explains.

An Amish man makes his own way through the same crowd of strangers, introducing himself merely as Amos. Four funerals, he says, were going to be held the next day in the homes of the dead children. This road would have to be clear then, he says almost apologetically.

The TV trucks with their loud generators and the photographers with their clicking cameras might spook the horses. It would be safest for everyone just to watch from a distance.