Based on the story of my ancestors, the Jacob Hochstetler family, and the massacre of 1757
Return good for evil. First, choose well your land: beautiful, tillable soil deep in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where “perhaps not a tree or bush had previously been removed,” where later skulking savage shadows will linger at the edge of a cornfield come suppertime. Mother: Refuse to feed your Delaware/Wolf neighbors when they come begging for food, thin and wanting in their own country just as you have recently been; refuse gruffly, so that later, the same knife that plunged into the first melon of the summer will plunge into your own ripe heart. Build your home near a “never-failing spring,” so it may later catch and wash away your blood and the blood of your loved ones. Sons: point your loaded guns into the half-light of daybreak at the not-tree figures gathered around the outdoor bake oven but hesitate to shoot. Father: raise your hand but not your voice to stop your sons from pulling their triggers, believing even in this moment of panic that “it [is] not right to take the life of another even to save one’s own.” (Do not consult your wife or daughter in this matter, being their protectors). Daughter: run to the stove amid the chaos to remove your latest apple creation from burning