Growing Up Amish (3 page)

Me, I was a raggedy little boy with a mass of wild, uncontrollable, curly black hair and large, deep-set, brooding brown eyes. I was very softhearted and sensitive, more so than my brothers. And a bit shy. Not particularly manly traits in the earthy culture that had produced me.

Once I caught a young sparrow that was fluttering vainly against a windowpane in the barn. But instead of twisting its head from its body and throwing it to the lurking cats, as I'd seen my brothers and friends do countless times, I walked a few steps through the barn door to the open air and set it free.

I never told anyone.

As I would come to discover later in life, one shouldn't be condemned for simply craving freedom.

* * *

My parents, David L. Wagler and Ida Mae Yoder, like most of the families in Aylmer, came from southern Indiana. Both Mom and Dad were born into old, established families in Daviess County, at that time a forlorn, backward place on the road to nowhere. Well established, but just different. Daviess is looked down on, ever so slightly, by staid blue-blooded folks in settlements like those in Holmes County, Ohio, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Like Nazareth in the Bible, nothing good can come from Daviess. Not much, anyway. People don't actually say that out loud, at least not in my hearing. Blue bloods are way too polite for that. But I know they think it.

I'm pure Daviess County stock. About as undiluted as it gets.

Mom and Dad's history did not particularly interest me growing up. My parents were my parents. They were just always there and always had been. Immovable, like the sheer rock face of a mountain cliff. And as indestructible.

It is difficult to imagine my parents as infants or young children because, being Amish, the family had no pictures. But they were children. In a time before penicillin, when diseases and plagues stalked the earth and infant-mortality rates were staggeringly high. Either could easily have succumbed at birth, or certainly well before reaching adulthood.

They were normal children, I suppose. Intelligent. Inquiring. Both were among the youngest in their respective families, welcomed by clans of clamoring older siblings.

David Wagler was a little boy in homemade denims and galluses and tiny rumpled shirts, with coal-black curly hair. Ida Mae Yoder, a little girl who stood about shyly with hands clasped before her like a protective shield. Amply mothered by her older sisters.

At age six they went to school with their peers. Swinging their lunch pails, they trudged the dirt roads to the one-room, public country schoolhouse where they learned their letters and figures, and to read and write and cipher.

They graduated from elementary school after the eighth grade, but Dad hungered for more. More knowledge. More education. So he was allowed to complete a mail-order course and receive his high school diploma, a rare and odd thing at the time. He was the only one among his peers who had the slightest inclination to do so. And he was the only one who did.

The years passed, and David and Ida Mae grew into young adulthood. Dad was a sturdy, handsome young man. And Mom developed into an astonishingly beautiful young woman. I take Dad's word on that. No photos of her from that time survive.

They married on February 3, 1942, when he was twenty-one and she was five months shy of her nineteenth birthday. From the start, Dad did not get on well with Mom's family. The Yoders were laid back, more relaxed about things like church rules, and they viewed my father with some suspicion. This man, who had stepped in and snatched one of their most beautiful eligible females, came from a long line of strident hard-liners. You were Amish, or you were nothing. In Amish society, the wife takes on the husband's identity, not vice versa. So the Yoders had reason to somberly reflect on what the future might hold for their daughter.

My father maintained an uneasy truce with Mom's extended family for about five years. Then a group broke away and left the Old Order. Founded a new church that allowed cars and electricity. And telephones in the house. Lured by the prospect of modern conveniences, my mother's parents and all but one of her siblings left and joined the new church. This deeply grieved and angered my father.

After an exploratory trip to Piketon, Ohio, where a small new Amish settlement was struggling to life, my father decided to move there. And so he bought a farm in Piketon, and within a few months, they sold their farm and many of their possessions and left Daviess. My mother was sad. And pregnant with her third daughter. But she had little, if anything, to say in the matter. She went along dutifully, as was befitting and expected of an Amish wife. From that day on, she was pretty much separated from her close family ties and her roots in Daviess County.

* * *

Our farm in Aylmer was located along the main drag, toward the eastern end of the settlement. It was a functioning farm, of course, with wagons and horse-drawn machinery parked here and there around the buildings and in the pasture. The barnyard was home to a herd of ragtag, mixed-breed draft and driving horses; twenty or so head of beef cattle; and a couple of cows that kept us supplied with fresh milk.

Dad usually had a few hogs around, and Mom kept a flock of chickens in a coop in the barn for fresh eggs. Tack on our collie dog and a half dozen wiry, half-wild mouser cats that were responsible for feeding themselves, and there you have it.

That was home.

Rambling and unkempt, but home.

Because Aylmer was somewhat progressive, we were allowed to have running water in the house. There was one lone bathroom, with a toilet and bathtub, and once a week, on Saturday night, each of us took a bath.

In winter, Mom cooked on a wood-burning stove in the kitchen. In summer, she used a kerosene stove. In the mid-1960s, Dad added a concrete-block wing to the south side of the house. A summer kitchen and washhouse, we called it. During summer months, we set up the large table and pretty much ate all our meals there.

Most mornings, all of us would sit around the table eating toast and eggs and Mom's homemade biscuits covered in dark, rich gravy. After the meal was finished, we would sit quietly as Dad took up the German Bible and read a passage of Scripture.

Then we would kneel while he prayed aloud one of the old High German prayers from the little black prayer book. It was always comforting and calming to hear Dad pray. Over the years, he developed a singsong rhythm in his delivery, a cadence that easily lulled a sleepy child into slumber. I can't remember any particular concept of who God was from those early years. Obviously, though, he was a force who could be addressed only by reading words from a little black book. Never informally.

After the five-minute prayer was over, we all scattered to our separate ways.

The children to school.

The older boys to work in the fields or the barn.

And Mom and the older girls to their cooking, canning, sewing, and seemingly endless stream of housework.

4

From the outside, it might seem that Amish kids must be bored. Nothing to do but work and play around the home and farm. No TV, no video games. No computers. Not even so much as a bicycle in most communities. Children have only their imaginations, homemade toys, and maybe a little red wagon. But I can't recall ever being bored.

We were always tackling some project—building dams across the little creek behind the barn after a hard rain, chasing some adventure in field and woods and pond. And working, of course. From about age three, each of us had our own chores to do.

With all that going on, we didn't have time to be bored, although there was one possible exception: church, where we had to sit, silent and still, on wooden, backless benches for what seemed like an eternity.

And it quite nearly was, because Amish church services are long affairs, usually lasting around three hours, sometimes longer. Services are held in homes, a practice dating back to our Anabaptist roots during a time when the authorities actively hunted and prosecuted those they deemed heretics. In an effort to avoid unwanted attention, our forefathers were forced to hold church services secretly in their homes.

In Aylmer, it was always a big deal to host church at your house. Around eight thirty in the morning, buggies would begin to trickle in. After letting the women out at the house, the men would proceed to the barnyard to park their buggies. After unhitching the horses, they always spent time at the barn, standing around and visiting in somber, black-clad groups.

Eventually, the preachers would slowly amble toward the house, followed by the older men, then younger men, and so on, all the way down to the teenage boys. (Seating was ordered strictly by age. It was considered an insult to step ahead of someone even one day older than yourself.) After everyone was seated on the long benches, one of the married men started the first song.

Amish songs sound a lot like Gregorian chants, but they are absolutely unique in flavor and tone. Written in old Lutheran German, the tunes are mournful, slow, ponderous, mellow, beautiful, melancholy, swelling, and up to twenty minutes long.

Legend has it that these songs date back to the time when our nonresistant Anabaptist forebearers were persecuted and burned at the stake by authorities of the Catholic church. Tradition says that they sang hymns as they were led to the stake in the public square and as the fire crackled at their feet. As they sang—or so the story goes—the worldly bystanders would dance to the faster upbeat hymns, stopping only after the flames and heat had extinguished the song. To combat such blasphemy, our plucky ancestors developed tunes that were much slower—so slow that dancing would be impossible. I have never been able to verify that such dancing actually occurred. In fact, I seriously doubt that it did. But it made for fascinating legend, and I believed it for years.

Like the German hymns, the rest of Amish church services are slow and somber and measured throughout. And stiflingly boring for the kids.

After several hymns, and after the preachers returned from their Obrote conference, the first preacher would stand and deliver a “short” sermon, as in twenty to forty-five minutes long.

After the first sermon, we'd all kneel for prayer. Next, the deacon would stand and read a passage—usually a chapter—of Scripture.

This would be followed by the main sermon, which was delivered by the second preacher. The main sermon could last from one to two hours. Needless to say, long-winded preachers are unanimously unpopular with the children, and probably with the adults, too. Not because of content, necessarily, but because it's hard for children and adults alike to concentrate after three hours or more have passed.

The sermons mostly consisted of a mixture of Scripture, gospel, and Amish rules. We heard from earliest memory the old Bible stories, spoken in intimate detail. From Adam, through Abraham and the patriarchs, all the way to the life of Jesus. And his death on the cross. It was all there, and it was all preached. And yet, somehow, the preachers all managed to weave the story into some strange brew of Amish context, the Amish rules and Ordnung. We were convinced, as children, that the Amish way was the only right way, the only true way. And that all those who were not Amish probably would not make it to heaven. Not that such a message was explicitly preached. But messages were preached in such a way that we could reach only that one stark conclusion. At least back then, that's how it was.

Aylmer had the normal contingent of three preachers: Peter Yoder, the bishop; Nicholas (Nicky) Stoltzfus; and Jacob (Jake) Eicher.

Nicky Stoltzfus was my least favorite. A tall, gaunt man with a long, majestic beard that curled out at the tip, well below his chest, he had hollow eyes hidden under bushy brows. The real theologian of the three, he preached by far the deepest sermons.

Barefoot he stood, preaching in a bone-dry voice.

Paying little heed to the time.

As a child napping with my head on my father's lap, I often wished Nicky would just shut it down and sit down.

I liked it much better when Jake Eicher preached. A fiery man with flat, straight-hanging hair and a bushy beard, Jake preached in a powerful, high-strung voice that invaded the last crevice in the remotest corner of the largest house. I've heard it said of Jake, perhaps unkindly, that he had one good sermon in him and we heard it many times. Probably true. But the man could keep the children awake and alert. He was my favorite, and the favorite of most children. We never napped when he rose to take the floor.

After the main preacher finally wound down, there was another long prayer—more kneeling. And finally, one last song, which could go on for another agonizing ten minutes or so.

Then—and only then—was church finally over.

I don't remember learning very much in church, mostly just wishing that it were over. Truth be told, the greatest lesson I ever learned in church actually came from my sisters.

One Sunday morning when church was at Alva Eicher's place, a family of strangers—probably relatives of somebody or other—had come in for the service. The father was really slick and cleaned up. Even his beard was trimmed. I heard later that they were from Nappanee, Indiana.

As we tied up the horses and prepared to go into the house, I noticed a couple of young boys hovering close to the slicked-up man from Nappanee. One of the boys was about my age and inordinately rotund. I stared at him, fascinated. His body was almost as round as it was tall.

All throughout the service, I watched this family, still marveling at this boy's size. I'd never seen anyone so young quite so large. When church finally ended and the children were released, we all excitedly rushed out to play.

Somewhere in the course of our play that afternoon, I approached the little boy. Round cheeked, he wore glasses perched on his pudgy nose. We stood there, sizing each other up. Hands in pants pockets. Awkwardly scuffing the dirt with our bare feet. At least, I was barefoot. He probably wore shoes, coming from Nappanee and all.

We stood there, face-to-face. I was on my home turf. He was a stranger in a strange land. He smiled hesitantly.