Growing Up Amish

by Ira Wagler

  January passed.

  February.

  Then March arrived. And with it came a huge event. The wedding of my sister Rachel. She had been dating Lester Yutzy, Rudy’s older brother, for a couple of years, and they had made plans to marry that month—March 6, 1980. The wedding was to be held at our home.

  The last time we had held a wedding at our house was my sister Naomi’s wedding to Alvin Yutzy, an intense man a few years her junior, in the spring of 1978.

  And I faintly remember my oldest sister, Rosemary’s, wedding in Aylmer. I was four or five years old. I recall much commotion about the house, nothing at all of the service itself, and boxes and boxes of hot dogs Dad had bought for the noon meal. Red boxes, with a picture of a chef waving a spatula. Hot dogs were a rare treat, entirely suitable for a wedding feast.

  There weren’t many weddings in Aylmer when we lived there, because the church fathers had dictated some very stringent rules on dating. For example, when a couple started dating, they could see each other only once a month, or every four weeks. Then, when things got really serious (expressions of love, talk of marriage, and so on) and they were “going steady,” they could increase that schedule to one date every two weeks. (Love made the days fly, I’m sure.)

  And the couple had better not get caught sneaking around or even looking at each other between dates. Anyone caught in such verboten activity could expect a prompt visit from the deacon, a grizzled, imposing man. And he wouldn’t be there to chat about the weather, either. At least not for long.

  I don’t know if the Aylmer church fathers thought the end of the world was imminent and procreation was therefore unnecessary, or what. But that’s the way it was. Talk about regressive conservatism.

  After we moved to Bloomfield, we discovered that dating couples there could see each other every week. We felt very liberated. Or at least my siblings did. Within a span of about six or seven years, five of them got married.

  Needless to say, over the years I took part in many weddings. My favorite job was waiting on tables for the noon meal. As a table waiter, you got to putz around getting ready in the morning, and you could leave the wedding service immediately after the vows to go and prepare to serve the meal. All told, a table waiter might have to sit for maybe an hour as opposed to the full three or four hours the regular guests had to sit quietly on those backless benches.

  Being a witness attendant, or “Nava Hocca,” was the least favorite job. The wedding couple had two sets of such attendants with them all day. It was considered the higher honor, to be Nava Hocca, but it was vastly more tiresome and boring. More than once I fell sound asleep sitting straight up with no support to lean against. (Try it sometime. It’s hard to do.)

  Anyway, an Amish wedding is an all-day affair. The morning service begins at nine or nine thirty. A good preacher can make the time pass relatively unnoticed, but chances are that the preacher will be as boring as chalk on a blackboard and drone on and on.

  Few things in life are more irritating than a boring Amish preacher who likes the sound of his own voice and doesn’t pay attention to the time. And there are plenty out there. Sometimes the hands on the clock seem to stand still, or even go backward, resulting in what feels like an endless day and restless guests.

  Another major irritant often occurs when the deacon, whose only job is to read a bit of Scripture, forgets his calling and decides to deliver an impromptu sermon of his own. Some deacons have been known to ramble on for up to twenty minutes. Whatever good they might imagine results from their words disappears in the hostile gaze of seething listeners whose only wish is that the speaker read the assigned verses and sit down.

  Everyone is greatly relieved when the bishop instructs the couple—if they still feel as they did that morning—to tread before him. They then rise, walk carefully up to him, and stand in front of him. At this moment, the Nava Hocca stand at attention. This is their official purpose, to “witness” the ceremony. After a prayer, the bishop administers the vows, places the couple’s hands together, and pronounces them man and wife. Then they return to their seats as such. From that moment until death.

  After we turned sixteen and joined the youth, or Rumspringa, we looked forward to weddings because we could ask a girl to the table for the evening meal and singing. This was not considered a date, and the girls rarely turned down an invitation. It always created a buzz, to see which guy would escort which girl. More than a few married couples began their relationship at the evening wedding feast of someone else.

  That’s how it goes at Amish weddings, with a few minor variations, depending on the community where it’s all coming down.

  Before Rachel’s wedding, we spent weeks getting ready. Junk machinery that had been littering the yard for months, sometimes years, was pulled up the hill behind the woods and out of sight. All the barns were cleaned. And the house, well, the house was scoured from bottom to top, scrubbed, wiped, mopped, and cleaned until it was glistening. It was a busy, frantic time, but when the big day arrived, we would be ready.

  It’s an important event, a wedding. Simple, but important. There are many relatives to invite, and in our case, many guests from Aylmer. We hoped they would come so we could show them how progressive a Bloomfield wedding service was.

  Guests began trickling in the day before the wedding in large passenger vans loaded with people and luggage. The exceptions were, of course, the Aylmer people, who came by bus or train, as they were not allowed to hire a van driver for overnight trips, due to the dictates of preacher Elmo Stoll’s regime.

  We were happy and excited to see everyone. And, of course, we were busy preparing, right up to the last minute.

  Then the day was upon us. The benches for the service were set up in Joseph’s house, and the tables for food were set up in our house. Dad walked about importantly. Mom beamed and fussed and worried. And I was a table waiter. Looking back, it was a plain affair, but to us, it was huge. Things seemed to be going very well for the Wagler family in Bloomfield.

  I don’t have a lot of specific memories of that day, other than the fact that Rachel and Lester were properly married, and a large crowd of guests assembled to witness and celebrate the event.

  I do have vivid memories of what came down the day after the wedding.

  17

  After the wedding, my uncle and his family stayed for a day or two to visit. His son Eli was a year older than I was, and we had always been close friends. On those rare times we got together, everyone could be sure of one thing—somehow, someway, we would get into trouble. When we were kids, it was usually just harmless pranks: passing around comic books and bragging about which brand of car was the best. (Eli was a Ford man. I liked Chevy.) And a few other verboten things, things so trite they actually escape my memory. As I said, absolutely harmless. But as we grew, we graduated to more serious offenses, like smoking, drinking, and buying radios. Now we were adults. I was eighteen. Eli was nineteen. And we were about to graduate to the big leagues of wild Amish living.

  The morning after the wedding, Eli and I announced that we were hitchhiking up to Ottumwa, twenty-five miles northeast. The adults frowned. My dad strongly discouraged us from going, but we ignored him, and shortly after breakfast, we headed up to Highway 2, stood beside the road, and thumbed a ride into Bloomfield. I knew some English people there, and one of them readily agreed to take us up to Ottumwa, fifteen miles north.

  Once there, we decided to pool our meager funds and look for a used car to buy. After all these years, I’m not sure whose idea it was, or when it first came up. I don’t remember who suggested it. Might have been a mutual thing we both conceived at the same instant. I know that in the ensuing months, my family blamed Eli, and his family blamed me. But I’ll take the full blame right now, just to clear up that ancient tiff. It was probably my idea anyway, being more experienced in leaving and all.

  We had probably five hundred dollars between us. So we headed to a car lot along Highway 34, just east of the ci
ty. It was a dreary, rainy day, and we arrived on the used-car lot dressed in Amish barn-door pants with galluses and plain denim jackets—all homemade, of course. The smarmy salesman greeted us with a shifty smile. Could he help us? Plainly, he doubted that he could.

  We were just looking for a used car, we told him. Might be in the market for a purchase. His eyes immediately perked up. We told him we had about three or four hundred dollars to spend, and he led us to the back of the lot to an old two-door Dodge painted an ugly avocado green. I don’t remember the model name, but it was built in 1972. The salesman claimed it was a good old car.

  “Heck, it only has seventy-five thousand miles on it,” he said. “This car will run and run, way over a hundred thousand miles.”

  “How much?” we asked, trying to act uninterested.

  “Four hundred dollars.”

  What a coincidence—almost exactly what we had to spend.

  “Could we take it for a test drive?”

  “Of course.”

  And, of course, the car wouldn’t start. Dead battery. So the salesman dragged an old black charger from the jumbled mess in his garage and hooked it up. Then he took us inside to draw up the paperwork.

  Looking back, if either Eli or I had expressed even the slightest reservation—if either of us had had the sense to say, “Wait a minute. Let’s think this through. Should we really be doing this?”—we would have backed out. But we didn’t. That’s what always happened when we got together. We’d step out on some bold adventure, and neither of us wanted to be the first to break. And so we hurtled on, straight over the cliff’s edge.

  By the time the salesman got the car started and drew up the paperwork, it was getting late. We handed him a fistful of crumpled twenties, and after carefully counting it, he slapped a license plate on our new car, and that was that. So, without a shred of insurance, we edged the car out of the parking lot and onto the highway.

  So far, so good. But now what? We hadn’t planned ahead at all. What to do? Head back home? That wouldn’t work. We had a car; we couldn’t go back home. Park it somewhere, maybe, at my English friends’ place in Bloomfield? That would have actually made some sense. But on that day, we were devoid of sense. After the excitement of buying a car, we couldn’t imagine heading back to my house. We wouldn’t be able to keep our secret. Besides, we wanted to hit the road in our new car. Head out into the big, wide world.

  We decided to head south on Highway 63, into Missouri, toward Eli’s home in Marshfield, three hundred miles away. So off we went, through the darkness, with only the clothes on our backs, a few bucks, and an old green Dodge with no insurance.

  We headed south through the darkness, and the old Dodge hummed along. It seemed like a decent car, and it actually turned out to be. We drove through horrible weather as biting rain turned to sleet, icing the roads. Around the Missouri line, I almost lost control. The car skidded violently from one side of the road to the other while I frantically cranked the wheel. We very nearly landed in the ditch. After regaining control, we crept along until we came to a motel and restaurant, where we pulled in, booked a room, and ate.

  We had no bags, no extra clothes, nothing. By the seat of our pants, and with no forethought, we were leaving home.

  We sent no word to our families to let them know our plans or where we were. That was the cruelest part of that black and wicked day. Back home, as the afternoon began inching into evening, I’m sure the folks became increasingly restless and worried. Eli and I had our reputations; our families probably had no doubt that we were involved in some sort of mischief. Years later, my father told me how frantic and worried they were when we didn’t show up. His voice heavy with emotion, he spoke of how his younger sister, Eli’s mom, stood in the rain at the end of the walks and peered into the darkness. To the south, out our long lane toward the road, she strained and looked and called her son’s name. There was no answer. Only the mocking sound of rain and the wind slashing through the trees. And intermittent silence.

  Eventually she gave up and straggled back into the house, soaked and chilled to the bone. No one ate supper that night. And sleep was far away and fleeting—a hopeless thing—as the two families, Eli’s and mine, sat there and wondered if they’d ever see us alive again.

  At the motel, twenty-five miles south of our worried, frantic families, we slept soundly. The next morning dawned, a nice clear day. The roads were good. But our green machine wouldn’t start. Dead battery. The smarmy salesman had taken us. After purchasing a new battery at a nearby garage, we headed south again, down Route 63, with not a care in the world, except that we were running low on funds.

  We reached Eli’s home turf late that afternoon. Still no plan for how we would survive or where we would live.

  We scrabbled some odd jobs here and there for money on which to live. Eli claimed to own some calves on his father’s farm, and at night, we would sneak in and grab a few from the pasture, tie them up, place them in the trunk of the old green Dodge, and sell them to a local English farmer. Technically, of course, the calves didn’t really belong to Eli, but to his dad. I knew it and he knew it. But we took them anyway, and sold them. We were flat out stealing. Each time, the money kept us going for a few more days.

  The news flashed three hundred miles back to Bloomfield about what the wicked boys were up to these days. (Or down to.) People clucked their tongues and shook their heads, and wondered aloud if we’d land in jail.

  We never found a fixed place to stay in Marshfield. Instead, we slept in seedy hotels, and sometimes in the car. But we hadn’t quite reached our low point—yet.

  After a few weeks, we decided to head back to Bloomfield in search of greener pastures. I’m not sure what we wanted there or why we went. I guess I just longed for my old stomping grounds. I missed my friends and wondered how they were. Eli and I were pretty much social outcasts. Outlaws. Drifters. With only each other for support. And that got a little tricky, in our heads. We argued and fussed sometimes. The stress of our situation went far deeper and affected us far more than either of us could possibly recognize or comprehend.

  We needed to hear words of affirmation. Words that would never come from anyone in our families. But we might hear them from my friends back in Bloomfield. And so, lonely and longing for something we did not have and could not find, we returned.

  Back in Bloomfield, we skulked about the community, hooked up with my old buddies, and ran around at night. We had no place to call our own and often slept in the car, huddling under blankets to fend off the night chill. We lived from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour, never really sure what we were doing next.

  Regardless of how bad conditions might have been at home, they weren’t as bad as that. But home was off limits to us now, after the stunt we’d pulled, leaving as we did with no word or warning. Besides, Dad had an ironclad rule: No son of his could live in his home and own a car. The line was clear. And I had crossed it. So the thought of returning didn’t even enter my mind, even though my “home” was only a few miles away.

  After a week or so, our funds depleted, we decided to head to Arthur, Illinois. Willis Herschberger, one of the old gang of six, agreed to go with us. He came from Arthur and knew the place and the people. Maybe we’d be able to find work there.

  And therein lies another paradox—Amish kids who leave and yet don’t. Instead, they hang around their own communities or, as in our case, head for larger communities where their language is spoken. Where there is some sense of familiarity, even though they remain outside the boundaries of acceptance in the Amish culture.

  Some invisible force draws them, as it drew us. Some sense of belonging, even outside the lines. And some sense of security, a sense that if everything fell apart, at least we would be among our own people. That is a strange thing, one that cannot really be defined.

  We planned to leave the next Sunday morning. I don’t remember who had the idea, and it doesn’t matter, but before heading out, we decided to tour past Am
ish places. We knew everyone was in church, and we figured we could find a place to steal some gas. The Amish wouldn’t call the cops. We knew that. In our clouded minds, it actually seemed like a good idea at the time.

  We cruised slowly through the neighborhood. Found where church was that day and then headed to the other end of the settlement, to Jake Schwartz’s farm, up on the north side. That would be the place, we figured. There were no close neighbors with prying eyes. We approached and pulled in cautiously, just in case someone was home.

  No one was. We located the gas barrel behind a shed and backed up the car. Then we discovered a lock on the nozzle of the hose. One of us—I can’t remember who—ran to Jake’s shop and returned with a hacksaw. We made short work of the padlock and threw it into the bushes. Then I removed the nozzle and began to fill the tank. We stood nervously, waiting for the tank to fill.

  Then Willis looked out toward the road. “Uh-oh,” he muttered.

  I looked up from where I was filling the tank.

  Out by the road, a pickup truck had pulled up and stopped. A neighbor. He had seen us and come to check on what was happening. The three of us stood there, momentarily frozen, our hearts tripping fast. We were discovered. Caught. Maybe the neighbor had already called the cops.

  I snapped the nozzle back onto the tank. Shut the gas tank lid on our car. We scurried around frantically. Eli and Willis both leaped into the car. One of them went for the passenger’s seat, the other into the backseat. That left me to drive. Frantically, I circled the car. “I don’t want to drive! I don’t want to drive!” I hollered.

  Eli and Willis were having none of it. “Get in and drive!” they shouted back in unison.