Growing Up Amish

by Ira Wagler

  The visitors displayed a wide variety of dialects and dress. Daviess County people talked fast and sloppy, with many English words mixed in. Holmes County people conversed in a slow drawl, taking forever to get anything said. Even their English taxi drivers spoke Pennsylvania Dutch. And Lancaster, well, those people used old German words we had never heard before and had no idea what they meant. We thought the Lancaster people the strangest. They were certainly the most unlike us. The men wore wide, flat-brimmed black hats, and the women sported funny little heart-shaped head coverings. We even heard rumors that their buggies were quite distinct from those in most other communities. Rectangular, like a box, with straight sides. Not angled in at the bottom, like those in most communities. And rounded tops. Hilarious to us, and strange.

  Guests frequently arrived unannounced, often just minutes before mealtime. Many of my early childhood memories include having strangers in the house, company from other communities who stopped by for a meal or for a day or for the night. Mom always scratched together enough food for everyone. Cheerfully. Only later in life did I ever consider how inconvenient that must have been for her at times. My sisters, too, have commented how they would bake a cake or some other delicacy, only to see it wolfed down by hungry guests they would never see again.

  Some guests left bigger impressions than others. Once, when I was about four years old, a couple stayed with us for the night. The man had salt-and-pepper hair, a sharp, pointy little beard, and piercing eyes. I was terrified of him for some reason and thought he looked quite evil. The next morning, as they were getting ready to leave, he looked right at me and asked if I wanted to go home with them. They needed another little boy, and I would be just the ticket. I was horrified and speechless, and wildly shook my head. He was, of course, only joking, but I didn’t know that. I learned to keep my distance from our guests after that.

  Once, several couples from Lancaster stopped by for a late afternoon meal. Only Dad and Mom ate with them. The visitors requested cold peach soup, which consisted of cold milk, peaches, and soggy lumps of bread. Standard fare in Lancaster County, we had heard. We lurked behind the curtains and watched as the adults sat there primly, visiting and eating the cold, gooey mess as if they enjoyed it. Though we were relieved not to have to eat the atrocious concoction, nobody collapsed after eating it, so it must have been okay.

  Occasionally single men would make the pilgrimage to Aylmer, emerging from the hills of who knows where, on a mission to find wives. Wild eyed and shock haired they came, sometimes lurking about the community for a week or two. None, as far as I know, were successful in their mission.

  One such long-bearded youth stayed with us for a few days. The first day, he asked for a basin of water and towels; then he disappeared behind our large barn to “wash up.” I don’t know why he didn’t just use our bathtub. They probably didn’t allow indoor plumbing where he lived.

  It was a good thing, I suppose, to be exposed to Amish people from other communities. It greatly broadened our experiences and our views, albeit still from inside the culture. Sure, we made fun of what we had not seen before and what we didn’t understand. But we absorbed it too. And eventually we came to respect others who were different from us.

  It’s a strange but indisputable fact: Even among the Amish, other Amish seem odd.

  3

  Few sights are cuter than Amish children. Little girls dressed in their bonnets and tiny, perfect, caped dresses; boys in homemade pants, galluses, and straw hats. Miniature adults are what they look like.

  I was one of them. Probably not quite as perfectly coifed as Lancaster Amish children, the ones you see in picture books. I was a bit more ragged. Barefoot, mostly, in summer. Snot nosed and dirty from playing around the farm and on the muddy banks of our pond.

  The ninth Wagler child out of eleven, I grew up amid the clamor and bustle of ten siblings. Five brothers and five sisters, each with his or her own unique quirks and personalities.

  Rosemary was the oldest. Born while Dad was away doing service as a conscientious objector to World War II, she barely knew him. In fact, when he did make his rare visits home, she was afraid of him. He tried to calm her, and once he picked her up and playfully tossed her in the air. As he caught her, she broke her arm. She screamed in pain and remained terrified of him for months after that.

  Rosemary was seventeen when I was born, and I have only faint memories of her in our home. When I was four years old, she married Joseph Gascho, a stern, hard-core Amish man, and they moved to a farm about a mile north and west of ours.

  Magdalena arrived two years after Rosemary. She was a sensitive, softhearted child who loved animals and could not bear to see anything or anyone suffer. Once, after some stray cats arrived at our farm, the boys threatened to shoot them. (We already had enough cats.) Maggie, determined to find them new homes, fashioned paper signs with the words “Please feed me” on them and taped them to the cats. Then she tenderly carried the cats in a box over the hill to the east and released them by the road and quickly dashed back home. Surely, she thought, someone would pick them up and care for them. Sadly, the cats could run faster than Maggie and were awaiting her at home when she arrived.

  My brother Joseph came next, the firstborn son. I’m sure my father secretly sighed with relief when Joseph came along. Now there was a son to carry on the Wagler name. Tall and lithe with a ready smile, Joseph was an admired figure in my childhood. Of all my siblings, his temperament is closest to mine. Brooding, melancholy, intense, but outgoing and friendly, too. As a young teenager, he once overworked a team while tilling the fields. One of the horses collapsed and died from the heat. Joseph struggled with the guilt of that for months.

  Naomi was tall and dark, and she could sing. As a child, she sang with Dad almost every evening, just the two of them. She nicknamed me “Bobby” when I was little. Where she came up with that name, I don’t know. Didn’t make a lot of sense, but it didn’t have to. She was my older sister, and I loved her.

  Jesse was shy and withdrawn and stuttered as a child. After the family moved to Aylmer, Jesse was befriended by the elderly English couple who lived on the farm just east of ours. Of all my brothers and sisters, he was their favorite. They called him Buster Brown. Jesse grew into a stocky, burly youth and left home before I was ten years old.

  Rachel was vivacious and outgoing, always smiling or singing, or both. An outstanding cook, she tirelessly fed us all. She knew what was going on in and around the community, who was in trouble and why, who said what and where. Even today, if I need to contact someone from the distant past, someone I haven’t seen for decades, I notify Rachel, and she always gets it done.

  Stephen was the only one of my father’s sons who could till the earth and make it produce. He worked hard and demanded the same efforts from us. He took the initiative while still a teenager and worked the home farm. Cleaned it up. Plowed and planted fields that had lain fallow for decades. A natural leader, he led his younger brothers on many an exciting foray. As an athlete, he was the most skilled hockey player in Aylmer Amish history.

  Titus was my next-oldest brother and my friend. We got into many scrapes together. We played around our pond in the warm summer months, fashioned rafts out of old fence posts, and sailed the “great sea.” We shared books and dreams. Collected stamps. And fussed and fought a good bit as well. The three of us—Stephen, Titus, and I—formed our own clique. We were known as the “three little boys.”

  I was just shy of three years old when my last sister was born. Rhoda displaced me as the baby. During our childhood days, she ran around outside with me, a tomboy to the core. Of all of us, she was the only one who could truly communicate with animals. Any animals—cats, horses, cows. She even tamed a Holstein steer and hitched it to a cart. Drove it around like a horse while the massive steer ambled along contentedly. Rhoda was the tenth child and once again evened out the boy/girl ratio at five each.

  Nathan broke that tie for good. The last, the eleventh
child, and the sixth son. He and Rhoda hung out together a lot, as I hung out with my older brothers. When Nathan was about a year old, he nearly died after he pulled a pot of boiling water from the kitchen stove onto his head. Suffering third-degree burns, he had a high fever and lingered between life and death for several days. My father, ever reluctant to go to a doctor, refused to take him to the hospital. Instead, my parents applied a homemade lard-and-dough poultice and wrapped the burns with gauze. Eventually Nathan recovered. The burns healed, but the scars still remain about his head and neck.

  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.