My Amish Childhood

by Jerry S. Eicher

  Back at the house, Mom hadn’t slept a wink, tormented all night and certain she would never see Dad’s face again. She was too scared to set her foot outside the house before daylight. I can imagine the greeting Dad received when he arrived home.

  And so we sat on the wooden fence the next morning and repeated the tidbits of the tale we knew with the Peachey children, hardly comprehending that such a thing had happened while we slept.

  Long discussions were held by the adults that day at the church house. Was Honduras livable any longer? Could they go on with the community when such threats hung over their heads?

  At home, Dad asked, “Should the basement digging continue?" Fausto and Pedro were sober-faced and had no ready answer this time. But they never stopped digging.

  The driver of Uncle Abner’s produce truck did notify the police, and they came out to investigate. But with the magnitude of the assault, they said, the matter must be referred to higher authorities.

  So the Honduras version of the FBI soon arrived, “the DIN,” and began their questioning. They arrived quickly at conclusions of their own, largely unsupported by the evidence. A notorious criminal had done this, they said. Someone just released from jail.

  A few days later the man was brought out on the back of a truck and driven around the community tied down like an animal on display. The police were hoping one of the hostages could finger him, but no one could.

  So he must be the fifth man, the DIN decided. The one you never saw. And that was about the extent of the investigation.

  Chapter 19

  Soon after the ruckus from the armed robbery, Fausto and Pedro finished the basement. They were flushed with excitement from their accomplishment. The hole extended for a great length along the side of the hill, coming down the slope for a walkout basement the full length of the backside.

  Fausto, for his part, had sealed his place in our hearts. His ready laugh and fun-loving ways are prominent among my childhood memories. Whatever farmwork I helped with, such as clearing the land with machetes and later planting and harvesting potatoes, Fausto was always there.

  Pedro was the youngest of the brothers, and more lighthearted than his older brother, but he still had a touch of a serious side. Their older brother, Beto, came by occasionally and would eventually find work in the community. Pedro did too.

  Beto was the most serious of the brothers. As in really serious. He would laugh sometimes with the others, but always at their instigation. On one point, the three were alike. They carried themselves with dignity and valued their own personhood. Unlike many of the locals, they didn’t seek to gain position with the Amish by attending their church. I never saw any of the three brothers at the services. Deeply religious though, they spoke often of Mother Mary, who lived “up there.” La Virgen, they said, watched over them.

  I never saw Beto or Pedro participate in making eyes at the community’s women or the girls who often passed by. Ogling was a national pastime for the locals, done openly and without shame. Grown men would stand staring with broad grins on their faces as their eyes followed every step of the Amish girls and women.

  “Wow!” they would gush. “Two weeks with her in the mountains. Now that would be something.”

  Fausto did have his faults though, such as taking up an occasional affair with a local woman. And he wasn’t that bashful about it either. The weakness of man was simply a fact of life to him, and he didn’t make any excuses for it.

  Now that the basement was dug and his position as our worker firmly established, Fausto had brought Elsa, and his daughter, Maria, to live in the shack Dad built on the northern edge of our property, just off the path from the cattle guard.

  Elsa was a slim beauty, shy, and soft-spoken. Fausto had met her while he worked a short stint on one of the neighboring ranches called El Mansion. He struck up a romance with her—as most locals did—by meeting secretly along the riverbanks. Elsa’s father, as was also common, fiercely opposed the union. Why, I have no idea, but it seemed the usual practice. The fierce father trying to keep the girl from sneaking off, and the two sweethearts still accomplishing the feat by hook or crook. Fausto claimed he snuck up to the creek while Elsa was washing clothes. It may have been a tall tale, but Fausto told it with a straight face.

  Once the romance had heated sufficiently, Elsa ran off with him one night—also a common occurrence. They went to Fausto’s parents’ house—likely a place that didn’t have more than two bedrooms and was already crowded. Having grown up in a house with plenty of bedrooms and just as much room besides, I have no idea how all that worked.

  Now Fausto had been without a job and had a wife to support. Not that they were legally married. That would have been too expensive. Living together sufficed, which was also the local custom. The running away date served as the beginning of the common-law marriage.

  So with his wife living at his father’s place and at odds with her parents, Fausto had showed up with his offer to dig our basement. And having succeeded beyond even his expectations, he now had his own place to live with his wife and child. It was no wonder he settled in with a broad grin.

  I spent many happy hours sitting outside their little one-room shack with a covered kitchen shed off to the side. Elsa had a baked mud oven covered with a barrel top that puffed smoke out through the roof. I sat there and ate the delicious food Elsa prepared. Tortillas from corn pounded out with a stone, formed into patties, and thrown onto the barrel top. All of it eaten amid the smell of wood smoke and surrounded by the open air.

  For a delicacy, Elsa would replace the regular round beans inside the tortilla with frijoles fritos. That translates into fried beans, but this was much more. I never thought to ask how she made them. And in only a few authentic Mexican restaurants stateside have I tasted anything remotely similar. It’s made by mixing in fat, I think, and other similarly unhealthy ingredients. But the mixture is awesome to eat. It must have cost more on their meager salaries than I could have imagined. I never thought to wonder why Elsa went to the expense. I didn’t see myself as the rich white kid that I was, with my dad as the boss of the farm. I was simply a boy caught up in the charm of their simple lifestyle.

  The kitchen also served as their living room, spilling into the outdoors without a door. The one enclosed room, its door opening directly to the outside, was the bedroom. There was no raised wooden bed inside like I was used to sleeping on, simply a mattress on the floor and blankets for the baby. The wooden slat siding let in the sunlight and the starlight as well. Rain though, was somehow kept outside.

  Periodically Fausto would have one of his affairs. He was, he told me with a bemused look on his face, mucho enamorado, much in love. The first we would hear of these escapades would be the specter of Elsa packing up her meager things in a wrapped bundle and preparing to leave.

  “I’m leaving,” she would tell me when I wandered by to show my sympathy. “Fausto isn’t coming home evenings any longer. He’s staying in town all night.”

  The funny thing was it usually involved an older woman. They seemed to be Fausto’s weakness. I guess he already had his young wife.

  Guaimaca was a good trek on foot and not undertaken lightly. But Fausto always showed up for work on time in the mornings, staying away from the little shack all day while the current affair was going on. Dad always chose not to get involved.

  I got into the middle of things.

  “Where are you going?” I would ask Elsa.

  “I’m not telling you,” she’d say. “Because you’ll tell Fausto.”

  I didn’t argue with that logic because I probably would have if Fausto asked me. Fausto never did though, taking care of his own problems in his own way. In the course of a few weeks, Fausto would get tired of the woman in town and figure out where Elsa had gone. How, I don’t know; probably through family is my guess. But there were also only so many places she could be. And on some Sunday afternoon they would be back, Fausto having made his amends that weekend. His wandering s
pirit settled for a time.

  Pedro was still young and didn’t have either a wife or a girlfriend that I knew of. He was the best looking of the three, and would have been a prime candidate to pursue one of the Amish girls—by legal means, of course, as he could have converted to the faith. This was what several of the locals were attempting already—seeing marriage to a white girl as the highest achievement they could possibly attain.

  Pedro turned his nose up at such ventures. I picked up disdain from both of the brothers whenever they mentioned the names of the amorous locals suddenly sprouting Amish suspenders and broad fall pants.

  Years later, on one of my trips back, I asked Pedro—who had by then married a local girl—why he’d never pursued a white woman.

  “It’s doesn’t work,” he told me, waving his arms around. “She would always be pushing me. She’d want a refrigerator, and then I’d have to work harder and always harder. And then she’d want a bigger house, and I’d have to go work in the States and never come back here.” But I guess going to the States with a white wife wasn’t considered all that bad a deal for the others. Numerous Amish and, later, Mennonite girls would end up marrying locals.

  Beto though, the sorrowful brother, ended up making the biggest mess of all. He never tried to join the Amish church like some did. Rather, he stuck with the local customs, blending them with the Amish rumspringa and coming up with a truly explosive mixture. The event involving him didn’t happen until we’d left, but it helped scatter the remaining Amish stateside. Rumspringa, Honduras style, turned out to be more than the Amish could handle. Beto was working for a family in La Granja by then, and he fell in love with the eldest daughter.

  “He had it bad,” Pedro told me later, claiming that Beto had never been in love before. That may or may not have been true. Most local boys had girlfriends at one time or the other. Be that as it may, there was no question that Beto had fallen hard for the Amish girl.

  How Beto persuaded her to elope with him, I have no idea. But on one of those deep, dark Honduras nights, she slipped out of the house with him.

  They met at the prearranged place, the young woman likely changing into local clothing that Beto brought along. An Amish girl traveling with a man at night would have aroused suspicion.

  Reaching the main road, they flagged a ride or caught one of the early buses going toward Tegucigalpa, although that would have entailed considerable risk, taking the chance other Amish might have been aboard.

  They arrived well before daylight north of Talanga at his father’s place—the same house Fausto had taken Elsa, and where Pedro would take his girlfriend to later.

  So in the local custom they were hitched. At least Beto thought so. To the Amish girl, it was all for fun, I assume.

  Back at home, morning brought consternation and panic as the girl’s empty bed was discovered. Disbelief at first soon set into reality as a further search was made, and the girl wasn’t found. Beto was surely involved, the other workers informed the father when Beto didn’t show up for work. He would have taken her to his father’s home, they said.

  The father set off at once, following the directions he was given. I doubt if Beto expected that from the father. Local fathers didn’t pursue their daughters when they ran off, but he hadn’t bargained for an Amish father.

  Arriving at the home, the father made his presence known, asking the girl to return with him at once. I doubt if the argument was that difficult to win. The thought of another night spent in a Honduras shack with the parents snoring through wooden slats on the other side of the wall would have taken much of the fun out of the jaunt by then. The girl chose to return, and Beto was heartbroken. I don’t know what he was thinking.

  Even with the girl back, the shock went throughout the Amish community like a man hit in the stomach with a full frontal blow. This was a ghost from the depths of Amish depravity come to haunt them on foreign soil. Not only had they fallen, but fallen lower than what some of them had left behind. It wasn’t hard for them to imagine what would be said stateside.

  “So you think you’re better than the rest of us? You people always thought you were so spiritual. How do you feel now? All your complaining about the young people from some of our communities, as if any of us could be perfect in this life. You didn’t like the impure dating practices. What do you think now? Is this where your spirituality was taking you?”

  Pedro told me later that Beto tried to marry the girl, the American way this time, and was rebuffed. Whatever the truth was, Beto never recovered from his love-stricken state. Though Beto wasn’t given to drinking, he entered a bar one night and intoxicated himself. Afterward, he attacked the bartender with his machete. Naturally, the man defended himself, pulling a pistol and shooting Beto to death.

  And contrary to local custom, none of the brothers sought revenge against the bartender.

  “Beto had a death wish,” Pedro told me, his face sober. “He wanted to go.”

  Chapter 20

  My friend Joseph Peachey’s mom, Miriam, continued to lose ground in her battle with cancer. The whole community waited, expecting the worst. Visitors—sisters, I think—came from the States to help out. I met them only briefly when I stopped by to visit Joseph. We were spending considerable time with each other by then, often hanging out at his place. The feed mill his father ran was a fascinating place. It was always filled with dust and the smell of ground flour.

  We were playing in the basement of the house one afternoon, with no thought on my mind of Joseph’s sick mother lying above us. One of the visitors appeared in the stairwell, telling us to quiet down. She sounded pretty upset—as she well had a right to be. I should have been told to go home, but I suppose their good manners didn’t allow such a radical action.

  I was told later that Miriam feared the growing cancer in her body greatly—as is understandable. But she especially feared the pain usually associated with its advance. And as the diagnosis became certain, Miriam prayed that she might be spared this agony in her body while living in a land that didn’t offer morphine. Miriam had her prayer answered, dying relatively pain free. We buried her on the hillside above Grandfather Stoll’s grave.

  Perhaps it was the family nature of the Peacheys, but I never saw them openly mourn the death. Not like the Stolls, who expressed themselves freely. The Peacheys kept it inside, going on with life the best they could. And they did a good job of it. The family never showed any outward signs of trauma, hanging together quite well. Their home became a welcome center in the community, entertaining visitors from far and wide. I know. I spent many a wonderful hour there.

  David Peachey made several efforts to remarry. First with a local Amish girl—a spinster who turned him down. We weren’t told why, other than the supposed fact that she didn’t get along with his children. That seemed like a weak excuse to me. We all got along quite well with the Peachey children.

  The other attempt I was aware of began with writing letters to a widow back in Pennsylvania. I don’t think David had met her in person until she came down for a visit. The attempt didn’t go that well either, and again because of the children. So perhaps they weren’t as nice to a prospective new mother as they were to the rest of us.

  David Peachey was a driving force behind many of the church’s financial outreach projects, promoting and broadcasting them in his letters in the Amish paper, The Budget. One of these projects began in the spring of 1972. It was called the Poor Ladies Project. In the proposed venture, widows or abandoned wives would obtain a regular stipend with which to support their families. That there was a need was not a question. Honduras abounded with abandoned wives and children. That is, if you counted their common-law way of living as marriage.

  So a program was devised and put into action with the best of intentions. A weekly allowance of food and money would be supplied through Bishop Monroe’s store. Applicants would be interviewed in person or at their residence in order to determine eligibility. Neighbors would be asked questions,
and so forth. One of the rules stated that the woman had to be truly abandoned, without a man living in the house. Even male relatives would disqualify her. The Amish wanted to help only the truly needy.

  So with this in mind a committee of men was formed. Why they didn’t think to use women, I don’t know. There would have been nothing in Amish tradition against such a thing that I know of. But then, there was nothing in Amish tradition about a Poor Ladies Fund either.

  Applicants poured in and needed to be interviewed. And after they had been approved, they had to be reinterviewed on a periodic basis, just to make sure their situation hadn’t changed—which the Amish had figured out by then did happen frequently due to the constantly shifting alliances of Honduras female and male relationships.

  Dad got his turn on the board soon enough. He had to make trips into Guaimaca on Saturday afternoons with David Peachey and Emil Helmuth to visit homes and talk to the neighbors of the applicants. He didn’t like the deal in the least, and not just because it took up his time. I never thought of Dad as a man astute in the romantic arts, but even he could see how this weekly activity in town might appear to the locals. Here you had three Amish men visiting single women on a regular basis. But then perhaps Mom was the one who educated him on the matter because Dad raised considerable objections to the project, although to little effect. The Poor Ladies Project stumbled on even with its obvious faults.

  For one thing, the project held great appeal to Amish donors stateside. There aren’t that many direct Amish charities outside of local tragedies for Amish folks to contribute to. And this one sounded good, even a little exciting—helping downtrodden women of the third world better their lives, all on a pittance of ten dollars a week. A sound investment indeed, which any thinking Amish man and his wife could see clearly. And it was run by honest Amish men who kept none of the proceeds for this charitable operation.

  The problem was the downtrodden women of the third world were quite crafty. They had their own way of handling this influx of monies from the States. The first order of business was to take full advantage of the opportunity, making her application at Bishop Monroe’s store, whether she had a man around the house or not.