Why I Left the Amish

by Saloma Miller Furlong

  It felt good to help Datt with what he loved doing, as I tramped through the woods in the fresh spring air and watched the first sap drip out of the spiles in the maple trees.

  As dusk was gathering, Datt said we would finish the next day. On our way home, from the tops of the tallest trees, we heard a bird whistle its lonesome Wheeeee—Whoooooo! We imitated it, and the bird answered back. Sarah said it was the chickadee's mating call. She liked studying birds and animals.

  Mem had made scalloped potatoes, meatloaf, fried carrots, and applesauce with whipped cream. Everything tasted so delicious. I knew Mem would be out in the sugarhouse boiling sap in a few days, and we would make do with eating in shifts and bringing her or Datt their supper in the sugarhouse. I decided to enjoy this while it lasted.

  Mem helped with the dishes, because she knew we were tired. Lizzie swept the floor, and the kitchen looked nice when we were done.

  ON A SATURDAY WHEN sugaring was in full swing, I helped gather nine out of twelve tanks of sap. I walked from tree to tree, pouring the sap into a larger bucket and carrying it to the tank on the wagon pulled by our workhorses, Don and Tops. When the tank was full, Datt drove the horses, pulling the load of sap, to the hill above the sugarhouse. I knew I shouldn't talk to him when he was concentrating on getting the wagon lined up with the metal pan where he would unload the sap. He would lean to his right, hold the reins taut, and then suddenly yell, “Whoa.” He would then let the pipe on the gathering tank down onto a metal pan with a pipe connected to the storage tank inside the sugarhouse. If he didn't line up the wagon right, he would have to go around in a circle with the load of sap and make another pass. He would get impatient with the horses and yell at them when that happened.

  During one of Datt's trips back to the sugarhouse, I stayed in the woods. I found a stone to sit on, so I could absorb the sounds of the forest. The water from the snow and spring rains soaking into the ground sounded like bubbles popping. I could hear the cars go by out on Forest Road. I heard leaves rustling. I looked behind me and saw a rabbit. I watched it and wondered if it knew I was there. I heard the hammering of a bird and saw a redheaded woodpecker high up in one of the maples. I watched him for a long time as he flew in and around the tall branches. Chickadees, nuthatches, and tufted titmice darted in and out of a big bush with red berries on it. When they all flew away at the same time, I heard the jingle of the horses' harnesses, and I looked up the trail and saw Datt coming back. I was rested and ready to gather more sap.

  Mem boiled as fast as she could, so there would be space in the storage tank for the loads coming in. I liked getting the first whiff of the boiling syrup when we got close to the sugarhouse. I walked into the warm steam with the smell all around me and heard the sap pouring into the storage tank. Mem had some warm eggs that were boiled in the sap. I ate one and then I got to taste the new syrup from a cup.

  At the end of the day, the horses would get ornery. Whenever they were headed in the direction of home, they would run. Sometimes they wouldn't stay standing in one place while we were gathering. Datt would yell at them, but that only made them worse.

  Sugaring was a good time of the year, I decided, as I brought Datt's supper to the sugarhouse that night. It was the time that Datt worked hard and we could get along with him. I walked around the last mud puddle and hoped that Datt was still in a good mood. I stood outside the sugarhouse door and said, “Datt, can you open up?” He did. He smiled when he saw the supper I had brought. I could tell he enjoyed the solitude of the sugarhouse after a long day of gathering sap.

  “Thank you for helping me today. You did a good job,” Datt said. I was so shocked, I stopped in the middle of unwrapping Datt's plate of food.

  I REFLECTED ON HOW all that is left of Datt's life on this earth are the memories we have of him. I was glad I had at least a few pleasant ones. I thought about his funeral that would take place in the morning, and I realized that the plan for us to be there an hour before the service is like a recurring dream I've had ever since I left the Amish. In this dream, there is always a church service about to happen, but everyone is waiting for me to arrive before beginning the service. I cannot go there until I have my Amish clothes on, and yet my organdy cape and apron no longer fit me. I usually awake in a sweat.

  Funeral Circle

  To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heavens: A time to be born, and a time to die ...

  ECCLESIASTES 3:1–2

  Datt's funeral did not resemble my recurring dream; in fact, it was as if I had converted the dream. I did not feel uncomfortable in my “high” clothing, surrounded by the four hundred other people at Datt's funeral, most of them in Amish clothes. I didn't need to wear Amish clothing that no longer fit me—either psychologically or physically.

  Rube's Dave, the man who had shaken my hand so heartily the night before, had directed the attendees of the funeral where to sit. They were seated on rows of backless benches, lined up the width of the shed. In most Amish communities, church services, weddings, and funerals are held in people's houses or in one of the outbuildings on the premises. Many of the church services of my childhood were held in the tops of barns, in the sheds where farm machinery was stored, or indoors when the weather no longer permitted outdoor services. Datt's funeral service was being held in the shed Joe had built for the purpose of storing his masonry equipment. The day was cool enough that some women had their shawls wrapped around them.

  Datt's closed coffin was right inside the door, with Mem sitting in her wheelchair at the foot end of his coffin. Next to Mem sat Joe and his wife, Emma. Because Sister Lizzie had not been able to travel from Kansas, I was the next in line according to age. David sat next to me. I wondered what he was thinking about these experiences, so different from his Roman Catholic upbringing. On the other side of David sat Sister Sarah and her husband, John. Sister Susan and her husband, Bill, were next, and at the end of the bench sat Brother Simon and his wife, Linda. Sister Katherine would have been sitting next to Linda if Susan and I had been successful in getting her a ride from Kentucky. Here was the symbol for all to see of how the men in the family had stayed Amish and all of the women had left: Brother Joe sat at one end and Brother Simon at the other, representing the Amish part of the family, with Sarah, Susan, and myself and our spouses in between. I don't know if this says more about our family, or the community in general. Certainly the men in the community benefited more than the women from the requirement that women be subservient to their men—father, brothers, and husband. But we also had Mem's example to go by: she had stayed in a difficult relationship in which she was much more capable of taking the lead than Datt, yet this was unacceptable within the community. She had rebellious feelings about having to be subservient to someone who was unreasonable and less intelligent and capable than she was, yet she strove to conform to the Amish ways. Mem's true feelings about the treatment of women were not lost on us girls. But somehow I don't think even the most subservient of mothers would have made a difference for me. I would have needed to be endowed with a whole different personality to be able to conform to the Amish ways.

  Joe sat with his head bent low, which was considered the humble Amish way, so that his chin was lost in his beard. His hair was cut in the Amish style, but it was unruly and stuck out on the sides, like many of the uncles and cousins on Mem's side of the family. Joe had a prominent overbite that had been one of his distinguishing features as a child. He was often teased for having “buck teeth.”

  There were many years in a row in which I didn't see Joe. I purposely avoided him—partly because I didn't trust him, and partly because I didn't know how to relate to him as an adult. When I saw him again three years ago, I was taken aback by how he had aged. He walked like Datt used to when he was an old man; he had a gray pallor, and his droopy eyelids obscured his dark eyes, but his nose was more like the pug nose from Mem's side of the family than the long, straight nose of Datt's side of the family. That Joe was sit
ting closest to Mem was symbolic of their relationship. Of all her children, Mem has always been the closest to Joe. She confided in him much the same way most women confide in their husbands, and much like most mothers confide in their daughters. I used to feel envious of their relationship.

  Once, when Mem was talking with Joe in the room where she braided her rugs, I eavesdropped while laying in my bed in the room next door. Joe was about thirteen years old and I was ten. I heard the confiding tone in their voices, so I stayed quiet, thinking I would find out what they talked about when they were together. I heard Joe ask, “Why don't you go shopping with Datt?”

  Mem sighed and settled into one of her stories that was meant for Joe's ears only. I felt like a sneak. I wondered if Joe knew I was there, on the other side of the curtained doorway that separated the two rooms.

  “I used to go shopping before all the children came along. But now it's easier to let Datt do it. I didn't want to go anyway after Momme went through everything I had bought and told me all the things that I didn't need.”

  “Was this Momme on Datt's side?” Joe asked.

  “Of course,” Mem said. “My mem wouldn't do that.”

  “Why did you listen to her?” Joe asked. Then he suddenly walked over to the door between the rug room and mine, pulled the curtain back, and said, “Lomie, go downstairs!” He said it in an authoritative voice, as though he were my father. Because I was afraid to do otherwise, I got up from where I was lying on my bed, and as I walked down the back stairs, I heard Mem say, “I didn't know she was in there.”

  Joe said, “I thought she might be.”

  So Joe was Mem's confidant, and Mem was Joe's protector. Through many of his cruel episodes, she defended and supported him. He and Katherine are the only two children who got Mem's protection. It was understandable that Katherine got it, considering she was the most vulnerable of us all, but it often seemed as though Mem displaced the protection the rest of us needed by protecting Joe from taking responsibility for his own actions. Yet, there was one time when she failed miserably in protecting Joe, just when he needed it the most.

  Joe was probably fourteen at the time. On this day, Mem had him chopping wood out by the driveway, to distract him from teasing and pestering the rest of us. When our midday meal was ready, Mem called to Joe to come in and eat. He didn't come. Mem looked out the window and saw that he was nowhere in sight, so she went out and called him, first towards the barn, then louder towards the woods. Still there was no answer. When Datt came in for mittag, Mem asked him if he'd seen Joe, and Datt said he'd seen him chopping wood out by the lane. Mem said, “That's what he was supposed to be doing.”

  We ate in silence, with Mem looking out the window every few seconds, as if she expected Joe to appear. After our meal, Datt hitched up the horse and buggy and drove down Durkee Road to look for Joe. The rest of us roamed the woods and called. No answer, and no sign of Joe. We came back, hoping Datt had found him. He hadn't.

  At suppertime we still didn't have any idea where Joe was. By now Mem was crying. At bedtime we were out of ideas of where Joe had gone. Mem sent us to bed, but I couldn't sleep. I wondered if Joe had run away from home. He had often threatened to, when he and Datt had their disagreements. He had not yet fought back when Datt whipped him, but the tension between the two of them was getting to a point of snapping, like a rubber band stretched too thin. As I lay in my bed, wondering where Joe had gone, I heard Datt running out of the living room, through the kitchen, and down the stairs, with Mem right behind him. Datt said reprovingly, “Joe, where have you been? You had Mem worried.”

  Joe said, “It wasn't my fault.” He was crying as he spilled out the story. He was chopping wood when two men in a pickup truck came along and asked him for directions to Forest Road. Joe had told them where it was, but they asked him to come with them to show them the way. Joe said, “But you'll have to drive me back if I come with you.” They said they would, but then they kept driving right past Forest Road. Joe asked where they were going, but they wouldn't tell him and kept driving to a horse farm on Route 168.

  “I kept telling them my family would be worrying about me, but they wouldn't listen,” Joe said through his sobs. “They kept saying, ‘You have to do this first,’ then they would make me do something else after that.”

  “Who were these men?” Mem asked.

  “Robley is the name of the man who owns the horse farm. I don't know the other man's name.”

  “Why didn't you come in and tell us you were leaving?”

  “Because I thought I was only driving up to the corner and back!” Joe sobbed.

  “What did these men want anyway?” Mem asked.

  “They said they wanted to see if I would be a good worker at the horse farm. They did offer me a job.”

  “They did?” Mem asked.

  “Why didn't they come ask us?” Datt asked.

  “They said they wanted me to see the farm first, to see if I would want to work there.”

  “Would you want to work for them?” Mem asked.

  “Not after what they did!”

  “That's what I was thinking,” Mem said.

  Several weeks later, when a big white pickup truck drove in the lane and a man came to the door and asked Mem and Datt if Joe could work at Robley's horse farm, they said yes. If Mem put up any resistance to the decision, I don't remember it. Datt was thinking about the extra money Joe would be bringing in. He didn't seem to care that these same men had kidnapped Joe several weeks before. I rarely felt sorry for Joe, because he was so brutal, yet I couldn't believe Mem would let him go work for someone who was obviously dangerous. I knew there was something terribly wrong about allowing him to work for the men who had kidnapped him.

  Joe worked on the Robley farm for part of the summer, and then someone in a white pickup truck showed up and dropped him off in the middle of the day. Joe was in tears, and he walked much like a child with a full diaper, or as if it hurt, like when he got a whipping from Datt. Joe never went back to work on the horse farm after that.

  What happened to Joe while he was working for Robley is still left to my imagination. I believe whatever happened, it was probably repeated when he worked for John Roberts on his fruit farm. John Roberts was known to molest young Amish boys, who were prime targets for pedophiles, given they learned how to submit to authority figures.

  I still wonder at my ability to forgive Datt for not protecting Joe in these instances, when it was obviously just as much his responsibility as Mem's. Perhaps it's because I had long before learned that I couldn't expect it from Datt—he seemed incapable of being a proper father. I expected more from Mem, however. Most of the time we relied on her to be the responsible parent, but such instances show how she seemed to have her motherly instincts all twisted up, like a clothesline that had to be untangled before it would be of any use. She wouldn't protect Joe from harm when he needed it the most, yet she'd protect him from his own actions, even when those actions hurt one of us.

  I was often more afraid of Joe than I was of Datt, because Datt's violence was momentary; Joe's brutality was calculated and sometimes premeditated, and it was often couched in the mind games he liked to play with people, like the time when I was five years old and Joe was eight. He and a neighbor boy, Brian, had a bonfire going out in the yard between our houses. Joe called me, so I went over to see what he wanted. He smiled at me as he and Brian sat on a log beside the coals of their bonfire. Brian didn't look at me. He just kept his eyes on the coals. I saw he was looking at a little toy tractor, made of metal, resting in the smoldering gray ashes.

  “Would you get that for me?” Joe asked, pointing at the toy tractor.

  “It's hot,” I said.

  “No, it's not. I just put it in there,” Joe said.

  I folded my arms and said, “So, if it isn't hot, why don't you get it yourself?”

  “Because if you do it, I will give you a roasted marshmallow,” Joe said in a buttery voice, holding up a bag of m
arshmallows and a forked stick. I looked at the tractor, then at Joe, who was looking at me with those eyes that said, Come on, you'll do it. I looked at Brian again. I couldn't tell what he was thinking, but I didn't think he'd let me burn my fingers, so I reached for the tractor.

  Just before my thumb and two fingers closed over the metal wheel, Brian said, “Don't touch it!”

  He was too late. I had picked it up. The burning pain made me drop it instantly, and I looked to see if my fingers and thumb were on fire, they hurt so badly. I ran screaming for the house. By the time I got there, a blister had grown, big and white, on my thumb and two fingers.

  I found out later that Joe had made a bet with Brian that he could convince me to pick up the hot tractor.

  DAVID WHISPERED SEVERAL questions to me as we waited for the funeral service to start. He wanted to know who certain people were, and I told him. As I did so, the uncles and aunts on Datt's side of the family, who were seated directly across an aisle space from us, bowed ever lower, with their heads as close to their laps as they could get. After several questions, David sensed the tension and stopped asking.

  Sister Sarah sat next to David, with her back straight. As a young woman, she had decided she was going to have good posture. Even during the three-hour church services, she would sit so straight that it looked like she had a yardstick stuck in her spine. Her hair hid the side of her face, but I knew she would have the pensive expression that new or stressful situations brought on. In most of her wedding pictures she had a pinched expression, as if she was holding back her feelings.

  Sarah's straight back reminded me of the time she had openly defied Bishop Dan Wengerd. At the time, she thought she was about to make a public confession in church for smoking cigarettes. Cigarette smoking was forbidden for Amish women—the men were allowed to smoke a pipe and cigars, and cigarettes were discouraged but not forbidden for the men. In defiance of that double standard, Sarah and Susan had both taken up smoking. I didn't follow suit, because I felt they should pick their issues—smoking cigarettes to me was not a worthy cause.