of family folklore. Jonathan did like it, and found the journal entries to be good entertainment in the chilly spring evenings. They were written in German, but he had the education to translate them. While his broken femur healed by the warmth of the hearth fire, Jonathan concocted his share of jokes about the ashen Spanish horse and its dusty warrior, and regaled his nieces and nephews with ghost stories of dead men who hunted recalcitrant Wulff children.
But each night, after the family had gone to bed, he’d stay up by the light of the family’s one electric lamp and part the aging hand-stitched papers, searching for a certain page, a particular paragraph that humbled his academic cynicism. At age twenty-three his grandmother Mathilde, the same age as he when the journal was given to him, had written:
It does not matter what anyone has to say of my experience, or that the preacher would rather I tell it different. Christ Jesus my Lord saved my soul when I was a girl, and He saved my body now that I am a woman. That He did it as a man breathed up of the ash the way Adam must have risen on the Sixth Day is not for me to examine.
It is no matter that I lack the preacher’s schooling, or that the men fear I be guilty of cavorting with the dead, or that the wives look at me from the tops of their noses as if I am addled by sickness. Whatever the explanation for my salvation, I am no senseless creature. I credit my life only to the Lord, Who numbers our days. Today I live though tomorrow I may die. But since I live when I ought to have passed on, I am bound to Truth, which is this: it is not for me to prove what God did, nor how, but only to remind all that He did it. There is no point in a miracle except that it expose the glory of the Lord, and so I’ll not try to cover it up. Look at what God has done!
Jonathan found her simple thinking to be endearing, a relic of an earlier time when faith was still hanging on to reason by the skin of its teeth. But he couldn’t deny that this last line of her journal touched his heart in a deep place that was hidden from everyone who knew him. He had fond memories of his grandmother, because she had lived until he was ten, and he had heard the story of her miraculous rescue long before he was aware of a journal.
If he had known her writing first, before he knew the person, he might have expected her to be austere and dogmatic, closed-minded and stern. But his memory could only recall a woman of great softness—in the eyes, in the jowls, in the hands, in the belly—whose arms and heart were always open, and whose hugs smelled of the metal-heavy mountain water she bathed in. She would greet him by cupping his chin in her hand and approving of his good health by exclaiming, “Look what God has done!” so that he sensed his very existence was a good thing.
But something more than sentiment held his eyes on the page, night after night. It was the possibility, however slim, however ludicrous, that his grandmother knew something important about this life, in this world, that he did not. And to a man of learning who respected all people of the past, this possibility was unbearable.
So on a warm day toward the end of April in 1924, when he thought he was strong enough, Jonathan gathered his cane and a rucksack and a small shovel and a canteen full of water. Not wanting to impede his healing, but knowing he couldn’t make the hike on foot, he cautiously rode his father’s most gentle horse uphill to the site of Mathilde’s Miracle, which until that day had been her miracle alone.
The area was not preserved as anything special, and fifty harsh winters had eliminated the ashes and altered the shape of the vegetation. But the cliff that had sheltered Mathilde was identifiable by its outcroppings, which she described in detail in the journal—she’d even drawn a picture. And some months after her recovery, before the next winter set in, Mathilde had returned and placed a small ring of broken granite rocks around the spot where God had “breathed.” It was her version of a