Growing Up Amish (21 page)

Looking back, there really was no reason why it couldn't have worked, at least on the surface of things. We were very compatible, she and I. She loved me honestly and deeply. She would have been intensely loyal. But in my heart, I felt nothing. No love. No feelings at all. Except a sense of pity for the pain I knew was coming. For what I would put her through.

During the years of our courtship, we got to know each other pretty well, up to a point. Beyond that, I would not allow her closer, would not allow her to explore the boundaries of my heart. Had I known then even a fraction of what I now know, the issues would have been confronted. I would have spoken, confided in someone. But there was no one—not one soul—I trusted enough to reveal what was in my heart. That's just the way it was.

And there was one other thing Sarah and I never did together. An important thing for any couple considering marriage, according to our preachers in the Amish church.

We never prayed together. Never approached God to ask for his blessing on our future. Never. We should have, I suppose. But we didn't. And the blame for that omission was mine alone. I was the man. In Amish culture, as in many others, the man is expected to lead. Physically. Emotionally. Spiritually.

I did not. Didn't have the nerve, I guess. And besides, I wasn't sure it would do any good. There were times when I wasn't even sure I believed in God at all.

I probably always believed there was a God, a sort of dark and frowning force. I just didn't believe
in
him, not to the extent that I thought he could or would make an actual difference in my life. I tried to believe, in my heart. But I couldn't, in my head. I'd heard about him all my life. But if he was everything the preachers claimed he was, he sure had a strange way of hiding himself from people like me.

And because we, Sarah and I, could not address the God we claimed to serve, because we could not as a couple even speak to him from our hearts, our relationship was doomed to fail.

Sometime late in 1985, I entered a land of looming, fearful shadows, a mental zombie zone, from which I would not emerge for several years. And gradually, I descended into a world of real depression. There was no diagnosis, because counseling was not an option. Requesting counseling, back then, would have been tantamount to admitting one was insane. Not that I would ever have thought of considering it, anyway. I wouldn't have known enough to consider it. So there was no help for me. The darkness would have to be faced alone.

Those were surreal days, in retrospect. I walked about in a fog of pain and silence, walled off from those around me. I wasn't angry. Only sad. And not particularly because of them. It was not their fault. They were who they were. And I was who I was. They could not communicate. I could not communicate. We didn't know how. We were never taught how. So we stirred about, passing each other like blind men stumbling in the night.

Had I been less intense or less honest, I might have squelched the doubts, ignored the depression, as most Amish youth somehow manage to squelch that inner drive, the inner hunger to know and live outside the box of Amish life. Some few probably never even wonder what's outside or, if so, only sporadically, lacking any real passion to find out. Some have vague perceptions that there is another world out there. Most decide to do what needs to be done, and they stick with it through sheer force of will.

But for me, that was impossible. I was trapped. The walls were closing in. Imminent disaster loomed. Those around me simply looked on in disbelief as I slowly sank before their eyes. In their defense, they offered what they could, which was little more than the broad, meaningless bromides I had heard all my life: “Can't you just decide to do what's right? Reject the ‘world' and accept the Amish way? Really and truly, once and for all?”

In the troubled fog of those days, Mom sought me out one day and tearfully spoke to me of Jesus and how he could help me, if only I asked him. Her words came from her heart, and she believed them. And I did not doubt them, necessarily. But what she said was hopeless. At least to me. I had tried that a few times. Praying. Never seemed to do much good. Maybe my prayers weren't heard. I doubted that they were. I'd done a lot of bad stuff, possibly even committed the unpardonable sin. Blasphemed the Holy Spirit, that horrendous act about which Amish preachers often thundered at great length and warned against. None had ever, as far as I could remember, defined that unpardonable sin. What it meant to blaspheme the Spirit. But it probably applied to me and the things I'd done. Who could tell?

I turned from Mom in silence. She did not approach me again, not like that.

My father, too, troubled by my traumatized state, admonished me kindly, or with what passed as kindness for him. The Stud's death, he decided, was the real source of my problems. The reason I was depressed. A horse is a horse, he told me encouragingly. There were other horses out there, as good as or better than the Stud had been. He even offered to buy me another one, any horse I chose. It was a generous, although somewhat desperate, gesture, coming from a tough old man like him.

But from him, too, I turned in gloom and silence. And he did not approach me again, not like that.

The days crept by. I still faced one major task, an ominous task, fraught with all manner of messiness—breaking up with Sarah. It loomed before me like the dark clouds of a gathering thunderstorm. Never for one instant did I consider slipping away. I would face her and tell her this hard and terrible thing. That I did not love her and that I was leaving. It was almost more than my exhausted mind could absorb, but I never considered any other option. The days of leaving with only a note to explain my absence were over. I would never do that again. Not to my parents. Not to anyone. Ever.

I would face Sarah and tell her. But when? How? There was never a good time for a tough job like this, but if it had to be done, I might as well get it over with.

With the Stud gone, I drove Kenny, a sad old plug of a horse, to church and the singing. Kenny was almost a caricature compared with the Stud. Big headed. Bony. Klutzy. No one in my position would normally be caught—under any circumstances—driving a horse like that, but I couldn't have cared less. Little pride remained in me for the trappings of Amish youth. And Kenny did get me to where I was going, albeit at his own snail's pace.

I don't remember where the singing was that Sunday night. After the singing, I hitched up Kenny, and we lurched slowly up to where the girls waited for their rides. Sarah flitted from the group and stepped up into my buggy. As I had done dozens of times in the past two years, I leaned over, slid the buggy door shut, clucked, and slapped the reins. Kenny plodded out the drive and lumbered down the road as the other buggies whizzed past us. We had three or four miles to go to get to Sarah's house.

I remember nothing of our conversation. She chatted about this and that. I mostly grunted in response. We traveled down the highway, then off to the side road leading to her house, the gravel crunching under the buggy wheels. I guided Kenny up to the hitching rail. Sarah moved to get out, but I held her back. Tonight I would not be tying my horse to the hitching rail. Tonight I would not enter her home.

She looked at me with startled eyes through the darkness. And I spoke to her in curt, choppy sentences. I can't remember my words to her in that moment—all I know is that I spoke to her, brutally and honestly. And after fifteen minutes or so, she walked alone into her home, stunned, crying, and heartbroken.

There is no human penance anywhere that can ever atone for the wrong I did to her that night.

* * *

The news flashed through Bloomfield. Ira had broken up with Sarah. “Oh,” people gasped. “Weren't they about ready to get married?” “What went wrong? Could it be that he just can't get settled down? Can't shake the ‘world' from his mind?” And their gossip, as often as not, pretty much nailed it right on.

I stopped attending the singings and instead stayed home, reading and brooding. During the week I still hung out at Chuck's Café. It was my only connection to sanity, at least the way I saw it. My friends there realized I was going through some hard times, but they didn't pry. They just quietly offered what support they could. And I held on to that world because it was a rock for me in the midst of those terrible days.

My friends and family were around me like sad shadows—separated, silent, but there. To his credit, Marvin never confronted me in anger. Maybe he should have. But he didn't. It wouldn't have made any difference. He expressed only sadness, and we spoke about the matter only once. He broke down briefly, wept openly, a thing I had never before witnessed. And then he let it go. We were friends from way back. He recognized and respected that. And he showed me the meaning of true friendship during those bleak days.

I saw Sarah now and again, but I never talked to her much, other than an awkward greeting. She came around periodically to Titus and Ruth's house, just down the lane. And one afternoon, after spending some time there, she walked up to our home to see Mom—at least that was the official reason. But she really wanted to see me. She had some things to tell me. I walked out with her to the banks of our pond, and we sat there on the grass.

She asked about my plans, and I told her I was leaving soon. She nodded. Absently, she picked blades of grass and dandelion stems from the bank, wove them together, then looped the woven band and tied the ends together, kind of like a little bouquet. Or a heart.

“I hope you find what you're looking for,” she said, looking right at me. Her blue eyes were pools of infinite sadness.

I could not meet those eyes. I looked down and mumbled incoherently. She still faced me.

“These are my people, here in this community,” she said. She wasn't pleading. Just telling me. She continued. “They are my family. I could never leave them.”

I looked at her, startled. I had never asked her to leave with me. I hadn't even remotely considered it. But it was important to her to tell me she wouldn't go, even if I asked. I wanted to respect that.

“I don't think you should leave,” I answered gently. “If this is where you belong, stay here among your people. It's not where I belong. I just can't do it, Sarah. I'm so very sorry, but I just can't do it. I tried. Believe me, I tried. I can't do it. I'm so sorry.”

It was a hard moment for both of us. I sensed the raw depths of her pain and felt the loss in her heart. But my own heart was far from her, and cold. Tears welled in her eyes. She nodded and looked away. I looked out across the pond.

We sat there silently through the eternity of the next few moments. There was nothing more to say. She stirred.

“I have to go now,” she said. I nodded and rose to my feet. As she got up to leave, she tossed aside the little ring of grass and dandelion stems. After she walked away, I picked it up and held it in my hands. It was a work of art, beautifully woven, about the size of a wristband. Too beautiful to discard. I carried it with me into the house and placed it carefully between the pages of a heavy book so it would compress and dry.

Through the years, and all that flowed from them, I somehow managed to preserve that woven ring as a remembrance of the beautiful young girl whose heart I so ruthlessly crushed, whose innocence was so cruelly shattered through no fault of her own. A token of guilt and penance for me, perhaps. But also a token of that time, those harsh and heavy days so long ago, when the world first trembled, then violently shook, then slowly collapsed in ruins around two young Amish people in Bloomfield, Iowa.

* * *

I left late in the spring of 1986. Behind me lay a long and bitter trail, littered with the remains of so many broken dreams, some of which were my own, but mostly those of others.

From my farming partnership with Marvin, I took one fattened steer and sold it at market for a thousand dollars. That and a duffel bag of meager belongings were all I took from almost two years of hard and steady labor on the farm. I didn't ask for anything more. I was breaking the deal we had made, and he would have a tough go of it as it was. Now he alone would do the work we both did before.

Our good-byes were sad and short. Abrupt, even. There was nothing much to say to Marvin, to Rhoda, to Titus and Ruth, or to my parents. An English friend picked me up at the farm and dropped me off at the station in Bloomfield, and I boarded the bus around noon that day. I sat hunched on the seat, motionless, as it pulled out and headed southeast to my connection in St. Louis, then on to Indianapolis. Then south to Daviess County, the land of my father's blood.

28

I dozed fitfully, slumped on the reclining vinyl bus seat. It was a comfortable seat for an hour or two—maybe even three—but not for a twelve-hour journey. The diesel choked and growled behind me as the bus rumbled through the night, on and on, hour after hour. Long after midnight we finally pulled into the station. I grabbed my bag and stumbled down the steps, bleary eyed, and scanned my surroundings for my cousin Eli. He had agreed to meet me at the station, even at this unearthly hour.

Soon enough he showed up, accompanied by a troupe of rowdy-looking friends. A band of intimidating, raucous toughs, they whooped and hollered as they approached. It was a Friday night, and they were feeling good. I gaped, mildly startled. I had imagined that Eli would come alone to pick me up so we could talk, the way we always did. But I greeted them all, shook their hands, and smiled, as if pleased to meet them. Of course, two minutes later, their names were as lost to me as if they were never spoken.

Eli and I embraced each other, smiling and greeting each other familiarly. He was my old friend from way back, though we hadn't hung out much since the troubled days of the old green Dodge. Since then, Eli had left the Amish and moved from Missouri to Daviess.

We chattered for a few minutes in our native Pennsylvania Dutch, and then I picked up my bags, and we walked out of the station. After packing my stuff in the trunk, all five or six of us piled into Eli's old T-Bird, which crouched low, sagging under the heavy load.