Growing Up Amish

by Ira Wagler

  I felt pretty much the same as I always had these past five years. Confused. Half-scared. Trapped. Resigned. And, deep down, desperately lost.

  21

  After Titus’s accident, he remained in critical condition at the Iowa City Hospital for several weeks. He had faced death back in that farm pond and had barely escaped. It was a close thing. Very close. Had the wind been blowing away from shore, the waters would have swept him out toward the center of the pond as he hovered, powerless to move, just below the surface. He would have died. As it was, the wind was blowing toward the shore and, thus, drifting him in. He had been under the water for close to two minutes.

  After moving out of intensive care, he remained hospitalized for several months before being transferred to a rehab center in Waterloo, Iowa. And there he began the long, arduous process of learning how to live as a quadriplegic. Most quads are paralyzed from the neck down and don’t even have the use of their arms. But a tiny bit of fortune smiled on Titus that terrible night. Although technically a quad, he could freely move his arms. Not his fingers—they were curled and lifeless. But he had his arms. And his brain.

  Still reeling from the shock of this harsh new reality, we slogged on with our lives week to week. Dad and Mom spent a lot of days with Titus. Especially Mom. She stayed at his bedside for days on end, both at the hospital and later in rehab. Once or twice I stayed with him for a couple of days. We struggled as we spoke. It was beyond strange to see my brother, chopped at the core, felled like a maturing oak before its time, and forced to enter a new existence, a new world. It was one I could observe but never, never comprehend. We talked of life as it had been, from our memories. We flinched and hedged from speaking of life as it was and as it was to be. But ultimately, we did even that. Awkwardly, almost lightheartedly, because that was the mask Titus wore.

  Although well meaning and certainly helpful, many of the Bloomfield Amish people turned into annoying pests. Eager, hungry they were, for all the latest tidbits. So they could send them on down the gossip pipeline, as interpreted by themselves. They launched an incessant barrage of simple questions, with one repeated a thousand times: “Does he have a lot of pain?”

  What does one say to that? “Well, let me think. He’s lying there with a metal frame screwed to his head. He can move his arms. And his head. Nothing else. What do you think? Would that be painful?” It got so we’d just mumble incoherently and turn away.

  We had no medical insurance. Most Amish people don’t. Titus was twenty-three and technically on his own, so Dad wouldn’t have been responsible for the bills. He could have shrugged his shoulders, bemoaned his son’s plight, and feigned helplessness.

  But he took it upon himself to look after the bills. To accept them as his own. The decision created a lot of problems. The bills continued to mount, and there was no way Dad could pay them all. He conferred with the Bloomfield church fathers. They counseled him to accept the bills. Somehow, the church would help get them paid. The church fathers also appealed to other Amish churches in surrounding communities. But it seemed hopeless. The bills were mounting inexorably, tens of thousands of dollars.

  And then a strange and wonderful thing happened. It came out of Aylmer. Old Aylmer, the place where I had been born and raised. Aylmer, still the shining city on a hill. At least publicly.

  The Aylmer people were quite shocked by the news of the accident, and they were sympathetic. In the next issue of Family Life, preacher Elmo Stoll, Aylmer’s powerful undisputed leader, wrote poignantly of our plight in his lead editorial. Briefly he wrote of Titus and of the tragedy that had struck that August night.

  Titus, he concluded, would never walk again. And then Elmo smoothly switched into fund-raising mode, imploring those who had read Dad’s stuff for all those years, who appreciated his efforts and his work, to send what money they could spare to help with the mounting hospital and rehab bills. It would be a chance for them to express appreciation to my father for his years of tireless labor as a defender of the Amish faith.

  We read Elmo’s words in that issue and marveled. The man could tug at the heartstrings, that’s for sure. But would his efforts produce any assistance for us?

  We didn’t have to wonder long. Within days the letters started arriving and continued for days and weeks after that. And weeks after that. Stacks and stacks, as many as fifty to one hundred letters and cards in a single day. Short scrawled notes, expressing sympathy and support. Little cheerful homemade cards, sometimes roughly colored by a child’s hands. And always, a bit of money. In some, as little as a dollar bill. Most others held more. Checks of fifty, a hundred dollars. A few for as much as a thousand or more.

  We were astounded and grateful. Traumatized by all that had just happened, we marveled at the blessings that literally poured in. And that’s how the eighty thousand dollars was paid. Eighty thousand dollars, the total for Titus’s hospital and rehab bills.

  It was remarkable, the way it all worked out. An incident like that is probably almost unique to the Amish culture. Not exclusively, but almost.

  * * *

  Before the accident, Titus and Ruth Yutzy, Marvin’s older sister, had been planning to get married. To settle in as a Bloomfield family. And as the reality sank in for us, it sank in for Ruth, too. The man she loved, the man she planned to marry, would never walk again. Not only that, he would require a lot of care. Every day. For the rest of his life. For her, it was a brutal time, a time of testing the true measure of her love for Titus.

  Amazingly, or maybe not, Ruth never wavered. She was by his side as he was rushed to the hospital the night it happened. She stayed by his side throughout his long journey from hospital to home. And their relationship survived even those treacherous, rocky waters. I don’t know what he would have done, or how he would have made it, had she left him. But she didn’t.

  And for Titus, too, it was almost beyond endurance, the thing he was now forced to bear. The desolate landscape in which he found himself. The rest of us were still back in the world he had just left. A world to which he desperately wanted to return.

  In both our worlds, we knew he never would. We couldn’t grasp it. But we knew.

  Titus had always been active, always excited about life, and always busily pursuing his next grand project, his next shining city just beyond the bend. Titus was always optimistic. Always strong, always striding forward. And now all that was gone. All he had ever known. Snuffed out in an instant. He would never walk again. It’s tough to get your mind around a thing like that.

  The months passed, despite the fact that each day seemed like a week. Titus gradually gained enough strength to balance himself on a wheelchair. Learned to feed himself. Learned to gain as much freedom as a person in his position could attain. And then the day arrived, in late November, that he came home. We had prepared the house, widening doorways, pouring a new concrete walkway that snaked back and forth up the grade of the hill to the house.

  We rolled him up on his wheelchair, wan and white and weak from the long ordeal. He smiled and smiled. He was home for the first time since that August night so long ago. We soon adapted to the reality of having him there. It affected all of us deeply.

  We had a special buggy built for him. A top buggy, with a standard seat up front for the driver. But the back part was empty and bare. The rear wall of the buggy was hinged and latched so it could be dropped down and used as a ramp. We pushed Titus up in his wheelchair, lowered and attached the safety bar, and strapped his chair down. It would be a death trap in an accident, but it worked. Fortunately, there has never been an accident with the rig. Not to this day.

  As for me, I worked halfheartedly on the farm. There was no one else to do it, now that Titus was unable to. Stephen had married Wilma Yutzy, Rudy’s older sister, a few years before, a few months after Rachel’s wedding. He and his bride moved to an eighty-acre farm a mile south of ours. Of course, his little farm blossomed. Whatever Stephen set his hand to always blossomed.

  So the
job of tilling the home farm fell to me, and I unwillingly took up the yoke. I had turned twenty-one on my last birthday, which is the coming-of-age year for most Amish youth. After twenty-one, the money you earn is your own. I had planned on working construction with a local carpenter crew, but now those plans were dashed. And besides, one other thing bothered me.

  I had left home three times as a teenager. Had been gone for well over a year and a half, thereby depriving Dad of the labor that was rightfully his. So I offered to work for an extra year at home for no pay. No one suggested that I should. I just offered on my own. That seemed like the least I could do, the right thing, the manly thing, what with all the other stuff Dad had going on right then. Dad was surprised, befuddled even, but he accepted my offer with the understanding that during slow times on the farm, I would still do some construction work and pocket that pay myself.

  And that’s what I did. Labored an extra year on the farm at home for free. And to be honest, things about the farm rapidly deteriorated that year. I detested farming and everything associated with it—horses, cows, plowing, planting, milking, and all the attention to detail that is required for a successful operation. Still, I struggled on, trapped by circumstances beyond my control. Trapped as a member of the Old Order Amish church. Just trapped in general. Maybe God was punishing me for my wild and wicked past.

  Meanwhile, my social life in the Bloomfield community continued. Marvin and I continued to hang out. Our close friendship had endured. We had journeyed together now for years. To distant lands and back again. And we had stuck together through it all. Not that we talked about it much. But we were quietly comfortable around each other, as old friends are.

  One Sunday evening at the singing, Marvin and I loafed around, talking about nothing important, just inane chatter. Suddenly he turned somber and gulped a few times.

  “Can I ask you something?” he asked, his voice flat and serious.

  “Sure,” I said. “What’s up?”

  He paused. Then, “Would you ask your sister Rhoda if she would have a date with me?”

  I wasn’t too surprised. Over the years, Marvin and I had hung out in each other’s homes countless times. We were practically members of each other’s families. I was instantly and instinctively pleased. He would make a fine brother-in-law.

  “Sure,” I answered. “I’ll ask her this week. You want to bring her home next Sunday?”

  He nodded nervously. And we switched back to normal settings. To be truthful, I didn’t know how Rhoda would react. She was now a beautiful girl of eighteen. The hounds bayed close and distant. Undeterred, she had already sent more than one would-be suitor packing.

  The following week, I asked her if she would date my friend. I was about as nervous as Marvin had been when he asked me to ask her for him. This could be a touchy thing. Amazingly, or maybe not, Rhoda didn’t seem too surprised. After only a moment of reflection, she agreed. The following Sunday night after the singing, Marvin proudly escorted her home in his new top buggy. My best friend and my little sister.

  Within months, they were going steady. I watched them with a tinge of sorrow. As their relationship grew, my friendship with Marvin took a backseat. It was still as strong as ever, but now my friend had more important things on his mind, things that demanded his immediate attention. Now both of my best friends, Marvin and Rudy, were dating. Maybe it was time for me to make a move as well. Start dating. Settle down for good.

  I already knew exactly which girl I would ask.

  22

  Nathan was the silent son. The youngest child, he never really connected with the rest of us, except on a surface level. Even when Nathan was a little boy, my father, perhaps exhausted from life’s heavy and incessant demands, pretty much ignored him.

  Whether or not he meant it that way, Dad didn’t seem to know or much care that Nathan even existed. No one noticed, at least not to the extent that one would see it reflected in the child. But from Nathan’s earliest days, Dad planted, firm and deep, the seeds for the bitter fruits of rage and confrontation once Nathan reached adulthood.

  Stephen, Titus, and I had always hung together growing up. We were known as the “three little boys.” Nathan, tagging along five years behind me, played and hung out with our sister Rhoda. The two of them were fast friends, and they did everything together as children.

  Nathan was sociable enough and made friends in Bloomfield. But compared with his loud, rather opinionated, older brothers, he always seemed shy and withdrawn. He turned sixteen a few months after Titus’s accident. As the baby of the family, Nathan was close to his mother. He hovered over her and protected her.

  Dad didn’t harass him that much, not the way he had harassed me years earlier. Mostly he scolded and admonished Nathan for minor infractions now and then. Always quiet, Nathan quickly drifted further and further from his home ties, such as they were. Of us all, only Rhoda made much of an effort to understand him.

  And by a few months after his seventeenth birthday, Nathan had crafted plans to leave. Somehow he contacted my old buddies in Valentine, Nebraska. They were eager for another good Amish worker from Bloomfield. And so, like me, he would set out to see for himself that other world. Only he was a bit younger than I was when I left.

  But he would not do what I did. He would not sneak away at night. Maybe he still remembered Mom’s shock and tears the morning of my first absence, or the evening we disappeared in the old green Dodge. Maybe he just couldn’t bring himself to treat her like that. Or maybe he had other reasons altogether.

  He told me one morning, a warm, balmy day in February, that he would leave after lunch. An English buddy would park out at the end of our long lane. Nathan would walk out to meet him. And leave. Just like that. In broad daylight. At seventeen. He would do that.

  Despite myself, I was intrigued and ashamed. Intrigued that he would actually walk out during the day. And ashamed at my own cowardly departure years before. I had sneaked away, not done it openly, like a man.

  I worked about the farm that morning, but it was tense. The hours dragged. Finally noon arrived. Mom had cooked our meal. We sat around the table and ate in our normal state of restrained tension.

  After the meal, Nathan disappeared into his bedroom. That wasn’t unusual. We always took a short nap after lunch. He quietly showered and packed his things in a light duffel bag. Mom was outside puttering around, maybe hanging laundry on the line. I don’t remember.

  Finally Nathan emerged from his bedroom and walked up to Dad, who was sitting in the living room.

  “I’m leaving,” he said shortly, abruptly.

  Dad looked up at him, uncomprehending. Then it slowly dawned on him what Nathan had just told him.

  “What? No, you should not do that,” he said, his face darkening into a serious frown.

  Nathan just grunted and walked out, duffel bag in hand, and shut the door behind him. Dad rose from his chair and followed him to the door. He stood there, looking out, unsure of what to say or what to do.

  And then Nathan approached Mom, working outside the washhouse. From a distance, I watched. I could not hear the words he spoke to her. Her face, at first turned up to him in a smile, suddenly collapsed in sorrow and fear. No, no. She mouthed the words. Spoke them. I drifted nearer.

  Then Nathan turned and walked away from her. Down the gravel drive, the long half mile to the road.

  He had gone only a hundred feet or so when she began to call his name, beside herself with horror. Fear. And love.

  “Nathan, Nathan, come back,” she cried. “Nathan! Nathan!”

  He was her youngest son, her youngest child, her baby. And in that instant, my mind flashed back through the years to another place and time. Back to our childhood in Aylmer. The morning when he left for his first day of school. She had packed his little lunch box, and he walked proudly out the door with Rhoda and me. It had been hard for her to see him go, to release him, even then, her six-year-old son, in first grade. As we walked down the gravel r
oad toward school, Mom had stood at the porch door on the west side of the house, watching. And every hundred yards or so, Nathan turned and waved at her. She waved back at him, smiling through her tears. He trudged on with us, then stopped and turned again. She was still standing at the door. He waved. And she waved back. And so on, until we walked out of sight.

  And now she stood heartbroken, in a frenzy of dread and fear and grief, and watched her youngest child walk away again. Not to school, from whence he would return that afternoon. But away from her, from our home, away into a cold and fearful world she had never known. A world in which she could not protect him, care for him, or watch over him while he slept. Her little boy, her baby.

  And this time he did not turn and wave.

  “Nathan, Nathan,” she cried, sobbing. “Don’t go. Come back. Come back home. Nathan! Oh, Nathan!”

  He hesitated only slightly but did not break his stride. Head low, he walked on. Not looking back.

  As the distance separated them, her voice faltered, but still she called. Sobbing almost uncontrollably, she stood there. Calling and calling his name. Calling for him to return.

  And that’s why most Amish youth leave at night, the ones who go, with only a note under the pillow to announce their absence. Because they don’t have the strength to walk that brutal road as Nathan did. Because they could not endure the mental trauma or live with the searing memories that could haunt a man for life.

  In the house, Dad stormed about aimlessly, fuming. In the yard, my mother stood there, still sobbing softly, watching the receding figure of her son.

  He reached the road and got into his friend’s waiting car. They disappeared to the south in a cloud of dust.

  I approached my mother. Stood there silently. And then, for the first and only time in my life, I held her in my arms.