‘God, why have you forsaken us?’

IT’S barely a town — a country crossing is more like it. Not much to it, really, except for a Thursday-night auction hall, a spring-fed swimming pool and a few homes framed by cornfields.

But those who live atop the little rise here have always felt a strong sense of place. Until Monday, when gunfire shattered their solitude, this was a place, they say, that danced with children’s voices.

“You could hear them laughing, shouting, playing baseball,” Ron Doutrich recalled, digging his hands into his jeans and gazing down, to where the steeple of a little Amish school peeks over the cornstalks.

“It’s innocence lost,” said Jim Davis, a pastor at nearby Calvary Monument Bible Church. “Wherever people are, evil can reside.”

The little school seemed to embody much of what people appreciate about their way of life here. It is a simple place, a tiny cinderblock structure, plain as could be. But the children who reached it on scooters and by walking through the fields were as animated and curious as their parents were stoic.

On Monday the classroom down the hill was silent, and the schoolyard filled with police cruisers. The rising moon competed for sky with four news helicopters.

Doutrich is sure it can’t stay that way. The Amish are resilient, he says, and will move past the school shooting by telling themselves it was God’s will. But Davis is not so sure.

People, of whatever faith, are bound to question how such a terrible thing could have befallen this hamlet and its people. And the answers, he says, won’t be easy to come by.

“I think the question people are asking right now is, ‘God, why have you forsaken us?’” said Davis. “What we have to do is allow people to ask the question.”