Crossing Over

by Ruth Irene Garrett

  The first place I turned to when we got back to Kalona was the Bible.

  Psalm 56:3–4: “What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee. In God I will praise his word, in God I have put my trust; I will not fear what flesh can do unto me.”

  Isaiah 41:13: “For I the Lord thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, Fear not; I will help thee.”

  If I could just hold God’s hand long enough, I thought, everything would be all right. And for a time, it was.

  Ottie and I managed to keep our emotions in check for the rest of the summer, and the leaves of fall brought a momentary diversion.

  I started teaching school.

  Every morning, I’d climb into my buggy—I had to hold on tight because it would list until I was in place—and head the three miles to the one-room Shady Lane School.

  It was pretty typical for an Amish school, and similar to the one I had attended as a child. A white, wood-sided structure with a concrete foundation painted sea-blue. A little bell housing on the roof. Old, lift-top desks and chairs attached by a metal frame. A mammoth tree stump, a slide, swings, and a merry-go-round in a side yard. A ball field out back with short fences and a wood and chicken-wire backstop. A silver outdoor pump that took a dozen or so hard pushes and pulls to draw drinking water.

  I had fifteen children in my classroom, and was paid eighteen dollars a day for my efforts—or about $2.40 an hour. Minimum wage standards did not—and still do not—extend to the Amish.

  I patterned my teaching methods after a favorite instructor of mine at Centerville School. She was a robust, fun-loving woman who enjoyed children and upheld rules with a firm but compassionate touch. She was my teacher for the third through eighth grades, and she was a far cry from my first instructor.

  I will name neither here, but my first one was a skinny, bony-fingered sadist who spoke with a lisp and delighted in punishing children to extremes.

  There were a number of things that could land a student in trouble. Dropping books on the floor, because it made too much noise. Talking out of turn, because it was disrespectful. Looking or smiling at other students, because it suggested a lack of attention to the lessons. Cheating and passing notes, because what school doesn’t discourage those?

  I remember when that first teacher punished two friends of mine for passing notes by having them clean a toilet with bare hands and a rag. A brush was available, but she forbade its use.

  Other times, she would punish students by having them stand in a corner with their noses pressed against the wall. And occasionally, she would draw a circle on the chalkboard and have the errant students stand before the board with their snouts in the bull’s-eye. For ten minutes. Maybe fifteen.

  It was utterly humiliating. I know, because even though I was a good student and a respectable child, I had my fair share of discipline. Once, I remember, I made the mistake of looking too long at another pupil in class. I wound up with my back to my colleagues and my nose in the circle.

  That first teacher also dished out spankings with a wooden paddle. They were done out of sight of the rest of the class, probably after school, when she did a lot of her disciplining—just to inconvenience the accused, I suppose.

  I don’t think there was a child under her tutelage who liked the young woman, and I don’t think there was one of us who was unhappy when the second teacher came along.

  The second teacher also paddled children, but she was more yielding with her most common form of punishment: sweeping the floor during the third recess. And if you got done before the recess was over, you could go outside and join the other children.

  As it turned out, I adopted the same reasonable discipline for my students. I also carried forth with an attitude of joy and caring, and borrowed from my second teacher such activities as putting positive messages or treats in plastic eggs and hiding them around the school property.

  I even invited Ottie once to teach a Friday class in drawing, something I’d seen him do earlier when he decorated the inside of Aaron’s hymnal with an eagle or drew pictures of places he’d visited in his travels. In class, he drew horses, buggies, cowboys, and cartoon characters. He also taught the children how to construct a person’s face by drawing an egg shape, splitting it into quadrants and starting the eyes just below the center horizontal line.

  The children were enthralled by such unbridled creativity.

  I vowed I would never paddle a child, and in truth, I never needed to. When a teacher treats students with respect and admiration, the students usually respond in kind. At least they do in Amish schools. At least they did with me.

  Teaching school gave me a sense of purpose and less time to think about my growing affection for Ottie. But in my weaker moments, I would let my guard down and my mind would wander.

  Ottie didn’t make it any easier. He began bringing me gifts from the road, including beautiful—and expensive—crystal swans.

  I’d hide the swans in my chest of drawers; certainly, my parents would consider them inappropriate gifts. But just like my feelings for Ottie, I knew where the swans were.

  They were never more than an inch or two from my heart.

  Eight

  Ottie, how could you do this to us? . . . You took her so she could not keep her promise to teach school again and her promise to the church on bended knees. We took you in as a trusted friend, tried to help you in time of sickness, and trusted you as a friend. Now you proved yourself not worthy of the trust at the cost of our darling daughter Irene.

  —LETTER FROM MOM

  Kalona is the kind of place where everyone knows everyone else’s business and, even if they don’t, they want to. It’s a place where neighbors know who the owner is when a dog barks, where Midwestern values—and provincialism—are protected fiercely.

  It’s also a tourist landing where thousands alight each year to see the Amish farms on the town’s outskirts—and the more modest Amish dwellings within the city limits, where horses graze in the fenced backyards of some homes.

  People come for the three-day quilt show and sale in late April, the Kalona Fall Festival in September, and the Kalona Historical Village, a collection of restored nineteenth-century buildings. Every Monday, they venture to the Kalona Sales Barn, where the proprietors offer horses, cows, sheep, and the like.

  There are the downtown staples like Reif’s Family Center, Yotty’s Hardware, and the weekly Kalona News, and the quaint-sounding businesses like Miller’s Medicine Cabinet, the Wooden Wheel quilt shop, and Ellen’s Sewing Center. A stone’s throw from the sales barn is Kalona Blacksmith & Welding, where the owner hangs a metal sign by the front door when he leaves. “Out on call,” it says.

  Just outside town, people can buy curds and such from the Kalona Cheese Factory, which proudly claims it will ship anywhere.

  Hills Bank has a diminutive white clock tower that nevertheless is the tallest structure in town. If that’s not enough to keep people on time, an air-raid siren goes off at noon every day. People set their clocks by it, especially the Amish, whose timepieces are powered by batteries or pendulum.

  Visitors are just as apt to see an Amish buggy and horse affixed to a hitching rail as they are a car parked in one of the downtown’s diagonal spaces. In Kalona, the natives like to say, the English and Amish coexist harmoniously, one living in the twenty-first century, the other a hundred or more years in the past.

  Residents call it the heart of Iowa’s Amish country, and boast that the seven hundred Amish inhabitants make up the largest such settlement west of the Mississippi. The town also goes by another moniker: “Quilt Capital of Iowa.”

  The Amish were the first to settle in Kalona, arriving along the banks of the English River (oddly enough) in 1846. The area was nameless then. In 1879, it became Bulltown, after a successful shorthorn breeding service. Later, it became Kalona, the name of the service’s famous registered sire.

  It was a truly bucolic, out-of-the-way burb until the 1950s, when Highway 1 was paved, providin
g easier access to and from Iowa City. Ottie says construction crews used creek gravel in the pavement mix; hence, the unusual pink hue.

  The highway brought more English—some from foreign continents—to Kalona, and some people stayed. Kalona’s growth challenged its pastoral ambience, but the larger the town grew—to more than 2,000, by some estimates—the more determined it became to preserve its heritage.

  The town’s original motto speaks to its desire to meld tradition and progress: “Big enough to serve you, small enough to know you.”

  It was in this fish bowl that Ottie and I existed. Known by everyone. Watched by the English and Amish alike.

  We developed a system of glances that would let the other know we were thinking of them. Ottie, meanwhile, kept bringing gifts. Flowers sometimes, or chocolate truffles that he would cleverly share with the rest of the family.

  I continued baking him goodies.

  Ottie, formally separated from his wife for eight months now, had moved into a two-bedroom, gray bungalow on Kiwi Avenue off Highway 1. The house, which he rented for five hundred dollars a month, stood alone, surrounded by corn fields and a spotting of poplar and pine.

  He arranged to have me work for him weekends, tidying his house, dusting and cleaning, doing paperwork, and tending to the garden. A mountainous man with a cane doesn’t get around easily.

  He also hired my sister Bertha and several of my brothers to mow the lawn and paint the fence, although they were more my chaperones than Ottie’s employees.

  The best part of the arrangement was being paid a princely sum of five dollars an hour, ostensibly to be closer to Ottie. The worst part was the temptation.

  And this time, it was me who took the lead. In February 1996, I stopped to do some work at his house—and to secretly leave him a present. I had cooked a container of popcorn and included with it several Hershey’s Kisses. It was my unspoken way of hinting I wanted a kiss.

  The next weekend, Ottie asked me about the chocolate drops. When he saw my face flush, he knew.

  While Benedict shoveled snow out front, Ottie moved toward me, softly kissed my lips, and stood back, waiting for a reaction—one he would never see. Although my insides were instantly consumed by a fluttering giddiness, I was stiff as a board on the outside, and for him it must have been like kissing a rock. I didn’t move. I didn’t close my eyes. I didn’t even open my mouth.

  When you’ve never been kissed before, you don’t know how to react. You don’t know about tongues, and opened mouths, and sharing saliva. In my case, the only comparisons were the holy kisses among the men and women at church. The tight-lipped holy kisses.

  Nevertheless, the moment broke another barrier, and our complex series of clandestine signals grew by one. Added to the repertoire of knowing winks and smiles was a tug on the ear lobe. If either of us did it, it meant we wanted a kiss.

  We also began teasing each other behind my parents’ backs—and in the process threatening to have them, and others, discover us. Ottie would occasionally tweak my behind when he walked by, startling me enough to make me jump.

  I was just as game. Once, when my mother and father were in their bedroom, I walked up to him in the kitchen and planted a firm kiss on his cheek. He later told me: “All I could think about was Alvin coming around the corner and saying, ‘What’s this!’ And what would I do? I can’t run.”

  Another time, while we were eating dinner at my family’s house, I began massaging his foot with mine under the table. Ottie was at one end of the table and my father at the other and they were engaged in conversation. Ottie became so flustered that he began stammering. Later he would tell me: “Irene, that wasn’t funny!”

  But it was. For both of us.

  It was also exciting. And frightening again.

  I began praying more in private, occasionally in my closet. I had read that if one does that, God will reward you.

  Matthew 6:5–6: “And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward.

  “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.”

  Always, I would ask God to lead me in the right direction. Often, I would cry because I was filled with so much confusion. How would I know if it was God or the devil that was taking me down this path? How would I ever sort out the scriptures that seemed to both doom and support such a relationship?

  Putting my faith in God allowed me some breathing room. But at the same time, the relationship grew deeper.

  We began slipping each other notes, putting into writing what we had previously only said or signaled or acted upon.

  I put one note in a container of banana bread I had left in our oversized silver mailbox. Ottie was preparing for another trip, and I told him he should stop by the mailbox when he headed out of town around 2:00 A.M.

  Dear Ottie:

  Please don’t let anyone see this note. Here is your banana bread and I’m so sorry we couldn’t persuade dad to go along.

  It hurts me, but remember, I’m going to miss you and think about you every day. I really hope you have good luck to make this trip worthwhile for you.

  Ottie, I’m going to be awake when you pick up the banana bread. If no one is along, you could whistle and I’ll whistle back. (To say “bye.”)

  How I would want to meet you by the mailbox and talk, but I was afraid I’d be heard going out, so I thought it better I wouldn’t.

  Don’t whistle if you don’t want me to whistle. But I’ll be watching.

  Love, Irene

  Ottie later slipped me this note:

  My Dearest Love,

  My heart aches to be with you. My arms want and need to hold you close and take care of you.

  I wish nothing but to hold and comfort you and take care of you all the time. My every thought is of you and only you.

  I can only pray that some day I’ll be able to do all of these things for you.

  In dreams, all my love and kisses,

  Yours truly,

  OG

  His mention of “in dreams” referred to a Roy Orbison melody that had become our song. The melancholy ballad tells of a star-crossed couple who can only be together in dreams. Like us, pretty much.

  Whenever we were in the van, Ottie would play the song. None of the other passengers knew its significance. But we did.

  Sometimes, Ottie would also give me cute little cards with short messages. One said on the front: “Next time you’re admiring all the wonderful things God has made . . .” It continued inside: “Remember that you’re one of them.” Another had a touching picture of two swans floating breast to breast. Ottie wrote on that one: “Sometimes there are no words.”

  The first time Ottie told me he loved me, I thought: Why would anyone feel the need to say anything like that? Love, after all, is not used in that context among the Amish.

  The second time he told me he loved me, he proposed.

  “Let’s leave,” he said. “Let’s get married.”

  “I can’t,” I told him, “because I’m Amish. I can’t because I can’t leave my mother or the rest of my family.”

  “Okay,” he said, joking. “I’ll stay here in Iowa and wait for you. I’ll wait until you’re twenty-five, and then I’ll have to kidnap you.”

  “You don’t have to kidnap me,” I said.

  And we both laughed.

  But privately, I was in pieces.

  I had written Ottie before about my conflicting emotions, so my reluctance was no surprise. It must have been frustrating for him, though.

  My Dearest One:

  I wonder what you’re doing tonight with these many miles between us. I’m crying my heart out for you. I don’t know what else to do except cry and pray.

  This morning when you were her
e, you seemed so sad. I felt so sorry for you, how things are going, that I wanted to put my arms around you and comfort you. I love you so much, Ottie! I know how you feel and, oh, it feels like my heart is being ripped out. To think of you leaving and I can’t go with you is almost more than I can bear.

  What am I supposed to do? How can I leave Mom when I know she will be blamed, abused, scolded, and maybe even hurt because of me.

  There was one time when he was so angry, I became uneasy that he might seriously harm her. Later, I asked her if she’s afraid that would happen sometime. She admitted she is afraid and cannot sleep if he walks “stealthy-like” through the house when he’s so angry. She cannot sleep until he is also in bed and she knows he is sleeping. That scares me. . . .

  I’ll sort of have to see how things go to know what I’ll do. But please remember, my love for you will never die! The red rose I pinned on your shirt will never fade—so is my love for you! I love you, Ottie!

  Hugs and kisses,

  Lovingly yours,

  Irene

  What I didn’t know then—but do now—is that I’d already committed to Ottie. I was caught in a vortex of passion from which there was no return.

  Nine

  Irene, you vowed in your baptism before God and the church that you would be a building and an uplifting church member. Are you helping build up the Amish church? Are you being a help to the younger generation?

  —LETTER FROM BENEDICT

  My grandfather, the one who had hired Ottie, died of pneumonia in May 1996. He had been one of the most powerful Amish men in Kalona, and not so much because he’d been a minister and a national Amish steering committee member. His truly important possessions were lots of money and all of the contiguous land east and south of town.

  When he’d go to the bank, people would joke that T. J. was lending money to the institution. Sometimes, money and land holdings speak more than position among the Amish.

  I liked my grandfather well enough, although I never felt particularly close to him. I remember he used to call me Ruthy and tease me a lot, especially about boys and such. But I don’t remember us ever having meaningful conversation, and he was stern and unforgiving like my father.