Crossing Over

by Ruth Irene Garrett

  “If Ottie doesn’t come here,” he said, “I have to believe Irene’s still here.”

  Asked if I might not have played some role—of my own volition—in leaving the Amish, he turned to my mother, who was sitting at the dining table, elbows planted firmly on its oak top, head in hands, face covered.

  “Well, what do you think, Mom?” he asked her.

  That was another thing he would do over and over during the conversation, as if he were trying to shift the tough questions—and perhaps some of the blame—to her.

  Sometimes she would answer. More often, she would remain still, leaving a painful silence in the room.

  “Can you think of any reason why there’s such a rift between you and Irene?” he was asked.

  “No,” he answered. “Mom, can you?”

  No response.

  Later, referring to the news articles, book, and perhaps a movie that would chronicle my life, he said, “There are a lot of people who’ve left the Amish, and they don’t do this.”

  “Does that mean your reputation among the Amish has been tarnished?”

  “No,” he answered. “Mom, can you think of any way it has?”

  “If it has,” she said, “we haven’t heard about it.”

  How strange they would say that, I thought later. In one of his letters, my father had written in German:

  It hurts so much that I have a daughter that is disobedient! And the New Testament says how the minister’s children should be obedient, and what a mark you make on us. And how serious when I am supposed to stand up in church again! The ‘mark’ that we and our children carry now hurts!

  At the far end of the dining table, a pair of eyeglasses sat atop an opened Bible, keeping the reader’s place. A yellow and green parakeet chirped busily in a cage hanging from the ceiling in the modestly appointed living room. Bertha, doing chores, periodically entered the spotless kitchen off the dining room to listen, but dallied only briefly before shuffling away. She smiled once at the visitors. My parents, backs turned, couldn’t see her.

  “Do you still want Irene to come back?”

  “Yes, I want her to come back,” my father answered. “How can she think I don’t?”

  “But if she comes back, she can never marry again. Isn’t that right?”

  “If she can humble herself to come back, God will take care of that,” he said. “She will lose her taste for marriage.”

  “She will?”

  “She will.”

  But if there was anything I would lose my taste for, it would be for the sometimes inflexible, narrow-minded ways of the Amish.

  Thirteen

  I feel so sorry for your family! I wish you could get a glimpse of the great sorrow and grief they are suffering!! Your mother is going downhill and Dad looks pale-faced! Oh how sad! I hope and pray that they will not lose their minds through all this!

  —LETTER FROM PERRY MILLER (UNCLE)

  They say a person can’t truly know something if they haven’t experienced it, or can’t acquire perspective if they haven’t been on the outside looking in.

  Both of these notions would serve me well as I entered the English world and saw for myself that not all English are evil—and not all Amish are good.

  Ottie said I was like a sponge, soaking up everything I could about my new life as fast as I could.

  “Honey,’’ he would say, “slow down. It ain’t gonna go nowhere. You’ve got time to learn.’’

  But I couldn’t be swayed. I had prayed to God, asking that he allow me to keep an open mind about what I would witness on the outside. Confident in his guidance, I became a magnet, drawn to every little detail, thirsting for a knowledge denied for too many years.

  I marveled at how friendly everyone was. From Ottie’s family, to strangers on the street, to the minister and congregation at our new place of worship—Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

  The church was truly something to behold. Families sat together, creating a warmth of spirit absent in Amish services. When the Amish gather for church, the men sit with the men, the women with the women. It is a segregation born of centuries of tradition.

  I was also amazed when, at the close of services at the Lutheran church, the Rev. James A. Bettermann hugged every parishioner who walked the greeting line. Such affection and caring I had never seen before in God’s house.

  Nor had I witnessed another grand religious ceremony of the South. Some Saturday nights between 7:00 and 10:00 P.M., people would cart lawn chairs to a department store parking lot in Glasgow and settle in for a night of listening to free gospel music performed by local musicians and singers. Marvelous, I thought. Simply marvelous.

  I was equally impressed one day when Ottie pulled to the side of the road as a stream of cars with their lights on passed in the other lane.

  “Why are you stopping?” I asked.

  “Because it’s a funeral procession. That’s what we do to honor the dead.”

  Honor. What a nice word, I thought.

  Among the Old Order Amish, such reverence would be unheard of. They believe that when a person dies, there is no sense in paying extended homage to them because they aren’t there to witness it. They don’t even place flowers on graves.

  Beyond the compassionate social customs of my new world, I also reveled in the modern conveniences and entertainment offerings. The electric appliances. The cars. The movies. Television.

  I instantly fell in love with washers and dryers, which could not only clean clothes spotless but do it quickly. Back on the farm, we’d have to fire up the gas generator to pump water into the washing machine. And when we dried the clothes, it was on an outdoor line. Washing clothes was such a chore, we usually did it only once a week.

  My first movie in a theater, Dragonheart, starring Dennis Quaid and Sean Connery, was a bit unsettling, both because we were sitting together in the dark and because the violence of the medieval fantasy was so graphic. I winced with every slash of a sword, every spurt of blood.

  In time, though, I grew to enjoy watching movies in theaters—and at home on television. Especially the old Westerns, and especially those featuring John Wayne. They seemed so true, so American, and so full of the right values.

  Television and the 1996 Olympics also offered my first chance to hear the National Anthem, and I was at once drawn to its beauty and power, experiencing for the first time a pride in America. The Amish don’t play the National Anthem. They don’t recite the Pledge of Allegiance, either, feeling perhaps that both overshadow God’s importance.

  A seemingly more mundane matter—shopping for clothes—took a little more getting used to. I had Faye to help me, but my naïveté overwhelmed her at times. Because we had made all of our clothes on the farm, I was completely oblivious to clothes-buying etiquette when I stepped into a department store for the first time. And the second time, and perhaps the third.

  The wonder of it all was that there were so many patterns and colors to choose from. The frustrating thing for Faye was that, despite the broad selection, I initially gravitated to clothes almost as conservative as my Amish attire.

  The first time out—I think it was a Sears or a Penney’s—I bought a navy blue dress with shiny, satin-like material and a rather plain peach dress. The hems on them weren’t much higher than my ankles.

  I also got a pair of white tennis shoes and white socks—white, because I was so tired of wearing black.

  I didn’t try the dresses on to see if they would fit because I felt uncomfortable with the idea of doing so in public. I didn’t know about dressing rooms.

  Faye, a stout, friendly blonde with a cackle that fills a room, would say, “Go ahead, try it on.”

  And I would hold the dress up to me and say, “No, it looks like it will fit me.”

  When I finally got the nerve to try a dress on—several shopping trips later—the results were embarrassing. While I was looking at one particular rack of clothes, Faye turned her attention elsewhere. Wh
en she looked back, I had put a new dress over the clothes I had worn into the store.

  “No, no, honey,” she said, struggling to hold back laughter, “we don’t do that.”

  “But if it fits over my clothes, it should fit me just fine,” I protested innocently.

  “Sweetheart, we have dressing rooms for that.”

  Faye would later say she had to leave the store briefly, go to the van, and compose herself. I guess Ottie and Faye had a good chuckle.

  Another time, having mastered dressing rooms but still short on protocol, I wore a new dress to the checkout line and paid for it, showing a surprised cashier the tags hanging from the sleeves.

  Fortunately, things got better over time. I graduated from modest clothing to attire with more pizzazz, although once I’d found a pattern I liked, I wanted to buy it in all the colors it came in. Kind of like a man buying dress shirts or slacks. One pattern, one maker, every color.

  I also began buying touches of makeup, perfume, and facial cream, things I had avoided early on because I thought such aesthetics silly and a waste of money.

  “Facial cream,” Faye said in her sultry Southern drawl, “helps stall the aging process.”

  “Maybe Ottie doesn’t want me to have it,” I quipped. “Maybe he’ll want me to age.”

  “I don’t think so, honey,” she said.

  She was right, of course. Ottie does like a little dab of feminine allure. Even in clothes, I learned.

  Shortly before Christmas, six months removed from the Amish, Faye suggested on a shopping trip to Nashville that we stop at Victoria’s Secret. Ottie, she said, would be most appreciative if I bought some sexy lingerie as an early Christmas present. And so I did. Nervously, but knowing full well he would be the only one to see it on me.

  That night, after we got home, I went into the bathroom, put on the red-and-white lace teddy, black garters, white gloves, and red feather boa I had bought and, feeling more than a little silly, strode awkwardly to the side of our bed.

  I could tell by the smile on Ottie’s face that he was pleased, that I looked rather fetching.

  “That’s a memory I’ll take with me, that’s for sure,” he would say later, grinning mischievously.

  Fourteen

  Today is Loretta’s birthday. We are planning to freeze ice cream for supper tonight with the fresh snow. . . . In a couple of weeks we will have our ninth wedding anniversary. (Time goes on) but we don’t know how long. Ann will be 2 in September. She is more fine-featured than the rest were. Her hands are no bigger now than Harold’s were at birth.

  —LETTER FROM ELSON (BROTHER)

  Of all the letters I received from my family after leaving, my oldest brother’s were the most consistently kind. They were the kind of correspondence you’d expect from a relative, filled with warm updates about a family’s day-to-day activities and rarely carrying a judgmental air. On one of his letters, he even had his children trace their hands so I could see how big they’d grown. They wrote their names in the white spaces of the palms and each drew a little smiley face.

  I’ve heard Elson took flak for choosing to be nice—to be brotherly in his letters—especially from my father. But Elson, bless his heart, is his own person, determined to right the wrongs of previous generations.

  On any given day, one can find Elson working in his cozy, odorous blacksmith shop behind his house along 110th Street, holding court with the English who come by word of mouth to have their horses shod. There, he melts globs of carbide onto glowing orange, hot-fired horseshoes—drill-teching, they call it—to reduce the wear on the shoes, and on this day he is refitting a huge, tan Belgian draft horse that is cinched tightly in a harness.

  He gets nine dollars a shoe for the drill-teching; twenty-eight dollars a shoe for the refitting, which involves digging out, clipping and filing the hooves, shaping the shoes with a hammer, and deftly driving nails into shoe and hoof.

  Elson’s work has given him the forearms and biceps of a professional wrestler and, with his reddish beard, sunglasses, hat, and bulk, he looks a little like country-and-western singer Hank Williams Jr.

  But he is neither fighter nor reveler. He is a dedicated thirty-something husband who recognizes—and in some cases deplores—the contradictions and biases of the Amish faith.

  In that way, we are alike.

  He has simply chosen a different path. His calling from God, he says, is to stay among the Amish to help them with their problems, and to forgive our father for his transgressions, something I continue to struggle with.

  Elson has a sense of humor that is rare among the Amish, and he sometimes used it to brighten our childhoods. One summer, when I was ten, Bertha, Aaron, Elson, and I were walking a gravel road to deliver a cake to an elderly Amish woman when Elson suddenly made a beat toward an electric cattle fence.

  “You suppose it’s hot?’’ he asked.

  We all nodded.

  “Bet it’s not,’’ he said, and he put his hand on the fence to prove it.

  “Well,” he announced, “it didn’t shock me, so it must not be hot.”

  He asked us if we’d like to touch it, too, and Bertha, cake in hand, reluctantly agreed after declining several times. But when she put her hand on the fence, a surge of electricity coursed through her arm, she let out a squeal, jumped several inches off the ground, and dropped the cake.

  Elson had fooled her, purposely failing to show how to time the syncopated pulse of the current by listening to it.

  Even today, Elson possesses a playful wit. His job, he’ll tell you, laughing, takes a strong back and a weak mind, the latter referring to the apparent stupidity of embracing an occupation that requires so much labor.

  Still, he loves his public work. And he loves his private life as an Amish husband to Loretta and father to six children.

  He dusts off the seat of a white plastic chair near the door of his shop and begins talking about growing up in the Miller family. A rooster crows brazenly just around the corner. Skipper, a scrawny, cat-sized, black-and-white dog with unbridled energy, scampers in and out of the shop, collecting white hoof shards and using paws and snout to bury them in the mud outside.

  A doctor from Iowa City used to visit to buy the shards at five dollars a bag so he could feed them to his dogs—in lieu of store-bought milk bones.

  “I don’t really know if they have any nutritional value,” Elson says, shrugging his shoulders.

  When he talks, Elson is deliberate, trying to make every word count, every thought both humble and accurate.

  He’ll tell you he was beaten by our father with leather straps when he was a child, usually for accidents that couldn’t be helped. Like breaking a window. They weren’t well-thought-out whippings to make a point, he’ll say. They were an inflicted pain born of blind rage.

  “I know Irene had her struggles with Dad, but really, plain to speak, I don’t think she knows what it was like to be abused like I was.”

  Our father, Elson will say, had little tolerance for people’s weaknesses and would often poke fun at people—his children included.

  To this day, he’ll tell you, he has trouble controlling his own rage, and on several occasions he’s had to apologize to his children when he’s flown off the handle. He prefers to “have a listening ear and to work things out together.” But rage, he says, is still his first impulse, even though it’s something he doesn’t want to repeat.

  “It takes more than just deciding not to be that way. It takes a lifetime, I think. I’m not expecting that it’s just going to fade or go away on its own.

  “The biggest thing is if you believe in the grace of God, I guess. That’s the only way I can handle it. God truly helped me to forgive my dad.

  “And I think, you know, as far as for me, logically speaking, I think Irene’s biggest problem was she couldn’t stand it. And as far as for her, she can’t forgive dad for what he did. That must be what she’s still working on evidently, or she wouldn’t. . . .”

  Hi
s voice trails off but the implication is evident: I wouldn’t still be away from the fold.

  He says he believes that Ottie and I can make it as a couple. His only concerns are that I married a much older man, and one whose ex-wives are still alive. As understanding as Elson is, the latter still constitutes adultery in his world.

  But on other matters of Amish doctrine, he is less understanding. He doesn’t believe that only the Amish can be saved.

  “There’s more and more Amish people feeling that way,’’ he says. “The more people I hear making remarks like that, the more it infuriates me. And for me, I got no problem telling people how I feel about that. There are some people that avoid me for that fact.

  “I guess I feel that if they do have that attitude, they don’t have any more chance than the outside people. God’s gonna look up everything. And if people have that attitude that they’re gonna have a chance above anybody else, they missed the point already. That’s totally taking something into their hands that they have no right to.”

  Elson will also tell you that people who criticize the Amish for not doing missionary work outside the community have a good point, although he has an answer for the naysayers.

  “If I want to be truly forgiving and be a Christian like Christ was, if I want to be Christlike, I have to lay things down . . . the biggest mission field is here at home, isn’t it? Don’t we have many Amish people in need, just like they do on the outside?

  “Just the very people who think they’re the only ones who are saved are the ones in need.”

  A bell chimes several times outside the shop where Elson sits, startling a visitor.

  “Is that the dinner bell?” the visitor asks. “Yeah,” Elson says. “But that’s just the children playing for the sound of it.”

  He goes on, without missing his place: “We’re all born with the same chance. It’s up to us if we’re going to try to live for Christ, or we’re going to try to live for ourselves and try to hurt other people.”

  Ten years ago, he says, he had a nightmare that had a profound effect on him. It was one of those dreams that makes a person suddenly sit upright in bed, trembling.