Abandoned Prayers

by Gregg Olsen

  Stutzman came out with the horse he called “Chris,” and made his first payment on January 1. He bragged about all the ribbons and trophies his son Danny had won showing the horse.

  The Reiningers had no idea, of course, that Stutzman was lying and that it had been Terry Palmer’s “son” who had won the ribbons.

  Mrs. Reininger felt that Stutzman was a fairly successful young man. He had a good-looking pickup, and he introduced himself with a business card that read E. S. CONSTRUCTION.

  Over the next few months, Stutzman came frequently to see the animal and to ride. At least twice he brought Danny along. One time he brought another man, whom Mrs. Reininger only saw from a distance. She thought it was a friend or an employee.

  If Susan Ruston had a hard time accepting son Denny’s sexuality, her third husband apparently found the situation intolerable. But it wasn’t Ruston’s parents who sent him packing for Texas. Everything came to a head when Ruston and his lover had an argument over where the younger man was going to spend New Year’s. Denny was adamant that he would join his parents in Michigan; his lover said he would stay in Iowa.

  “I finally figured I was old enough to make my own decisions and I’ll do what I damn well wanted. So I packed up my shit and left,” he said later.

  He arrived in Austin on January 4, planning to live with his Aunt Wanda until she left for Hawaii at the end of the following month.

  When he arrived at the Sawyers’, Wanda, who continued to look for every excuse to get away from Mac, suggested they call Eli Stutzman. Stutzman came over, and the three of them went back to his place, where he introduced Denny to Glen Pritchett.

  Denny made the assumption that Pritchett was gay, because he lived with Stutzman. He was later disappointed when he learned that Pritchett was as straight as the interstate to San Antonio.

  Ruston’s first night in the big city was one he would never forget, nor could the kid from Iowa have ever imagined it. Stutzman took Ruston and Pritchett out to a leather bar downtown. It was the Iowan’s first encounter with the leather scene, and he later admitted he was a little shocked. Stutzman seemed to get some satisfaction from exposing the hardcore side of the gay world to the novice.

  It was early morning when they stumbled back to Banton Road. Stutzman invited Ruston into his bedroom and shut the door. Pritchett flopped onto his bed and fell asleep in the other room. Danny was already asleep in his bedroom.

  Ruston was nervous, but because Stutzman was such a good friend of his Aunt Wanda, and because they had talked on the phone a couple of times, he felt he knew him well enough to engage in anal intercourse.

  Besides, the former Amishman wasn’t bad looking.

  “He had a nice chest, nice arms, a cute little round butt, a nice box—I wanted to see what the package looked like unwrapped.”

  Stutzman asked Ruston if he minded if Stutzman used a cock ring. Ruston had never seen one, but said it would be okay. Stutzman also said he thought it would be a good idea if he used a “butt plug” on Ruston. Ruston refused. He did not feel comfortable or that he knew Stutzman well enough to allow the insertion of the graduated latex cones into his rectum.

  Stutzman satisfied himself and went to sleep.

  After the first of the new year, Pritchett’s phone calls to his ex-wife had moved beyond nuisance to the limits of harassment. Sandy Turner, whose roller-coaster life had left her shaky, viewed each call as a possible setback instigated by a man she needed to stay away from—father of her two kids or not. She coped with it her own way—with crying jags, cold beer, and an occasional scream back into the receiver.

  Pritchett made four calls to her Missoula apartment in an eight hour period on January 25, 1985. The first call, at 6:31 P.M., lasted almost half an hour. The caller was the “sweet” Glen, caring and sober. Sandy told him she was getting married again.

  “It’s a mistake,” he told her. “It’s too soon. It’s no good rushing into marriage.”

  “If it is a mistake, it’s my mistake. It’s my life,” she shot back, saying good-bye to her ex-husband.

  At 1:56 the following morning, Sandy’s phone rang again. This time it was the obnoxious and drunken Glen—the man she had divorced in September. Nostalgia evaporated.

  He was angry and insisted that she was throwing her life away and that the marriage would never last. He yelled and she slammed the receiver down in his ear.

  Twenty-one minutes later, Pritchett called again. Sandy listened to his tirade for only five minutes this time. Pritchett asked to speak with Sandy’s fiancé, who Sandy had foolishly let slip was spending the night. This, of course, made Pritchett even angrier. Sandy hung up.

  At 2:39 A.M., Sandy answered the phone and, at Pritchett’s insistence, handed the receiver to her fiancé, who talked with the ex-husband for a minute or two. Sandy got back on the line, listened to a barrage of insults and doped-up reasoning, and hung up for the last time.

  She changed her phone number the next day and never heard from Pritchett again.

  One time, after work at the Pizza Hut, Ruston came over to the house and found Pritchett drunk and crying.

  “He told me that he missed his ‘wife.’ He never once referred to her as his ‘ex-wife.’

  “Glen said he wanted to go back. It sounded very sincere. He missed her so much. I gave him my shoulder and he cried for a good twenty minutes,” Denny later recalled.

  Stutzman told Wanda Sawyer about the nightmare of being gay in the Amish, and gave that as the reason for his leaving the Order.

  On another occasion he offered her the opportunity to wear one of Ida’s dresses. She quickly declined, unable to bear the thought of wearing a dead woman’s clothes.

  While his father was running around Austin with sex on his mind, Danny seemed to be making progress in school.

  Speech pathologist Ruth Davis had been seeing Danny twice a week for thirty-minute sessions in her office at Maplewood Elementary. She categorized the boy as a severe stutterer.

  Danny told her that his mother had died in a fire. The way he talked about the incident made it sound as though it had just happened in Colorado.

  Davis felt Stutzman was concerned about his child’s progress, yet uncomfortable meeting with a teacher, as some parents were. Stutzman would sit quietly, his hands crossed and folded on the child-size desk. Yet it was Danny’s behavior that struck her the most. When his father was in the room, the boy seemed unresponsive and didn’t look at Stutzman as the man spoke.

  One day Danny came to Maplewood with a black eye and bruises on his arms. Davis considered the possibility of child abuse and later recalled that the subject was discussed at a staff meeting, though no formal complaint was made.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Wanda Sawyer had become like a mother hen to a most unlikely group of men, and it was hard on all of them when they learned she was finally going to leave for Hawaii at the end of February.

  She was sad to be leaving Stutzman, whom she felt had been a true friend. She was even more disturbed about leaving Danny.

  “Doesn’t it ever bother you that your son is growing up in an atmosphere like this?” she once asked Stutzman as she drove home with him from the bars.

  He didn’t answer. It was dark in the truck, and Wanda couldn’t even see his face to gauge his response.

  Wanda even considered asking Stutzman if she could take the boy and raise him in Hawaii. She didn’t ask, though, because she knew Eli would have been offended.

  Yet, she did feel that he was a good father. It was just the environment that was all wrong for the boy.

  On February 23, Glen, Denny, Danny, and Eli gave Wanda a going-away party. Stutzman gave her a plate of glass with a rose etched onto it, similar to the one he had given Gertie Paton. Wanda later added her own touch by painting it with red and green fingernail polish. She could have used purple or fluorescent yellow—other colors in her collection.

  They also gave her a gigantic dildo.

  She left four days
later, after the divorce was final.

  At first, Denny stayed over at Stutzman’s place because it was easier than going home to Aunt Wanda’s at 2:00 A.M. and waking everyone up. Eventually, Stutzman said he could move in.

  Stutzman’s house could scarcely accommodate two grown men and a child, and three men posed even greater problems. Stutzman had the back bedroom, his water bed nearly covering all the floor space. Danny’s room was the small one in front, facing the street. Glen Pritchett slept on a sofa in the dining room, and Denny Ruston took Danny’s bedroom. Danny slept with his father in the water bed. All of Danny’s toys and clothes remained in his room.

  When his father brought a lover home, Danny slept on the sofa in the living room.

  As the weeks passed, Ruston learned more about Stutzman’s life as an Amishman.

  Stutzman confided that he had known he had homosexual tendencies even before his wife died.

  “He told me he was cleaning the stables when he came across an Amishman masturbating in the barn. The man didn’t know Eli was there at first, then the two of them ‘engaged,’ ” Ruston recalled.

  On another occasion, Stutzman told Ruston that a Wayne County businessman had given him a blow job, while he was still married to his Amish wife. Stutzman may have been referring to the time David Amstutz had turned him down. Or perhaps there was another time when someone else had agreed to a request for oral sex.

  Once, when they were in the garage getting some tools for a job, Stutzman showed Ruston some clothes Ida had made. He had also kept her wedding dress, some of his work clothes, and Danny’s first “dress.” Everything was arranged neatly, and Stutzman knew exactly which drawer held which pieces of clothing before he opened it to show Ruston.

  “Whatever happened to your wife?” Denny asked.

  Stutzman told him about the night of the fire, a version that matched what he had told Wanda: Ida was feeding the baby when the fire broke out. Instead of coming and getting Eli, she went out and tried to fight the fire herself. Stutzman, still in bed, woke to find his wife missing, and later dead in the barn. He carried her across the road.

  Ruston asked if he had a picture of Ida, and Stutzman shook his head.

  “The Amish don’t believe in photographs. It’s robbing the soul.”

  Stutzman showed Denny a picture of a handsome man he called “Peter.”

  “He said he had met him in Colorado,” Ruston recalled. “Before he and his lover bought the ranch. The photograph seemed to spark happy memories of his life in Colorado.”

  “Whatever happened to your lover?” Ruston asked.

  “He died in a car wreck.”

  “Oh, really? What happened?”

  “Faulty brakes,” Stutzman said matter-of-factly.

  Ruston wanted to know what had happened to the ranch. Stutzman told him that his deceased lover’s parents had come in and taken everything that wasn’t nailed down—and then some.

  “They wiped me out. They came in and made me sell everything that was ours together and give them half. I sold most of the horses, but kept the one I brought to Texas. I lost everything.”

  As far as Denny Ruston could see, Eli Stutzman was a good father—at least when he spent time with his son. Stutzman once told Ruston that he was a member of a gay father’s group, and that it was helpful for him to know that others were experiencing the same problems.

  Sometimes it seemed as though anyone and everyone other than Stutzman spent time watching the boy. Pritchett, Wanda, neighbor Mark Taylor, and various gay friends baby-sat when Stutzman went out cruising, cock ring in tow.

  Except for after school, before supper, Danny was never alone. Danny’s routine was simple and everyone living at the Banton Road address was expected to ensure that it was maintained. The boy got up for school early—many times after his father had left for the day. He was to let himself in through the unlocked back door in the afternoon. Bedtime was 9:00 sharp.

  The only time Ruston saw Stutzman raise a hand to the child was when he did not come directly home after school. The boy’s bedtime was also critical. It was only after Danny was in bed that Stutzman could go out to the bars. “Danny knew that once he was tucked in, he stayed in bed until morning,” Ruston said later.

  On a few occasions the boy was left alone, but Stutzman didn’t see it as a problem.

  Ruston saw no signs of abuse. Stutzman’s shower curtain was transparent plastic, so when the boy showered, there was little left to the imagination. If there were bruises on Danny, Ruston never saw them.

  Ruston never brought any lovers home to Banton Road, out of respect for Danny and Eli. When he met someone he wanted to trick with he usually went to their place. Sometimes Ruston took care of business in the front seat of his ’75 Chrysler Cordoba.

  A rougher, more hardcore side to Stutzman came to light after Ruston moved in. The former Amishman seemed to drop his guard and made comments that indicated darker sexual desires.

  “I’ll slap you around and fuck your brains out,” Stutzman told a man at a leather bar that catered to the crowd that dressed in harnesses, studded collars, and chaps. Stutzman, however, dressed more subtly. He wore a black leather arm band and vest.

  The back door at the Banton Road house should have been a revolving one, so many men came and went at all hours of the day and night. Stutzman, Ruston, and Pritchett partied every night.

  One night Stutzman came up with something new.

  “He said he had a trick in his bedroom and wondered if I wanted to join them in a threesome,” Ruston recalled.

  “Eli put handcuffs on the guy, behind his back, and used the butt plugs on him—going from finger-sized to almost fist-sized. I just watched. The guy was drunk. It was really strange—I had never seen anyone use handcuffs on someone else,” Ruston said later.

  Stutzman climaxed, got off the man, unhandcuffed him, and that was that. The man just lay on Stutzman’s water bed in a stupor. There was no doubt the man had been brutalized. Ruston felt that if the man had not been so drunk, he would have begged to be released.

  “He could not have enjoyed it,” Ruston said later.

  Danny, clad in Smurf pajamas, slept soundly through the incident.

  Denny Ruston might have felt a little jealous over the whole thing. He later told people that he had found Stutzman to be a disappointing lover.

  “To be perfectly honest, I found Eli to be somewhat boring in bed. He wanted to get himself off and didn’t care about the other party. When it comes to out and out getting into it, I like to be satisfied, too. I never did get off, the first evening we were together.”

  Though he felt there truly was a friendship, Ruston was excluded from some of Stutzman’s activities. Sometimes Stutzman would bring a man or two home and go into his bedroom and shut the door.

  “I don’t think I participated in that one occasion the way he wanted me to. I think he was a little bit hesitant about asking me to join in again. Still, I felt that he was into a different scene than I was—he was into toys and hardcore.”

  When Stutzman said he needed someone to clean his house, Ruston volunteered. The fact that it paid ten dollars was gravy. Stutzman’s house was never very dirty.

  One day, while he was cleaning the kitchen, Ruston wrote “I love you” on a scrap of paper, circling it with a big heart. He hung it on the old white Frigidaire.

  That night, when Stutzman saw the note he crumpled it up.

  “Denny, sit down,” he said. “This kind of stuff cannot go on. You are a nice-looking young man. I like you a lot. But I don’t want to sleep with you. I don’t want to have a relationship with you. You are not my type.”

  Ruston was hurt, but didn’t say anything. Stutzman did all the talking.

  “What would have happened if somebody came in and saw this? I have a lot of people come in and out of this house. It wouldn’t have been good for somebody straight to come in and see this kind of note.”

  After that, Stutzman and Ruston never slept togethe
r again. “I felt we were friends and that was it,” Ruston said.

  As far as Wanda Sawyer could tell from their phone conversations, her nephew was falling in love with Eli Stutzman. This both pleased and troubled her. It would make her feel more secure about Denny’s future and safety if he were involved in a monogamous relationship. She was concerned, however, when she learned that Denny’s feelings were not returned by Stutzman.

  Ruston told her about the note on the refrigerator, and other gestures he had made to turn Stutzman into a lover. It is true that Denny had seen a lot in his young life, but his feelings were genuine. He couldn’t understand what Stutzman’s hang-up was. Why didn’t Stutzman want him? There were times when it bothered him that Stutzman was going to bed with other men. He told Wanda about the threesome with the man in the handcuffs.

  Later Stutzman assured her that he cared about Denny, but that it was only friendship he wanted. Denny was just plain too young.

  “Wanda, I get so upset with Denny at times because he doesn’t want to keep it a secret. I can’t afford for people I do business with to find out I’m like this,” Stutzman said.

  Wanda understood the problem, but she still felt sorry for her nephew. In the back of her mind she felt that Eli had led Denny on in order to get him to come down to Austin. But she couldn’t figure out why.

  Pot smoke filled the house on Banton Road. Almost every night the three men would kick back and smoke a 12-inch joint that Pritchett had rolled. If Danny walked in, Stutzman instructed the others to conceal the dope—although, considering what Stutzman had done with the boy in Colorado, such a gesture was more for the benefit of Ruston and Pritchett than for the little boy.

  One of Pritchett’s jobs was to roll twenty-five joints every night for Stutzman to take to work and sell during the day.