Growing Up Amish (5 page)

Almost every Amish community has that unusual, or odd, family, as do most English communities, I suspect. They dress differently. Talk differently. Act differently. In Aylmer, that family was the Herrforts.

Solomon Herrfort had moved to Aylmer as a single man. He emerged from the backwater area of the plain and very conservative Milverton, Ontario, community. He worked for a time as a hired hand for my uncle, Bishop Peter Yoder. Later, he married Esther Gascho, and they settled on a small farm a few miles northwest of our home.

Solomon was different, no question about it. He was small, lean, and wiry, with a shock of unruly orange hair and a stringy, dirty-orange beard. He was a bit slow and eccentric and hard of hearing. His typical response to any comment was a prolonged “Ooohhh,” probably because he couldn't hear what was said to him. We children made fun of him and said he had wax in his ears.

A grove of tall trees obscured the dull brick house on his farm at all times, even on the sunniest day. The house itself was spooky, with many sharply peaked gables. It was always gloomy after dark; the only light was the pale, flickering glow of the dismal little kerosene flame lamps the family used in their home.

The Herrforts never took a turn holding church services in their home like other families, and they rarely socialized with other families in the evenings. Solomon didn't like to be on the road with horse and buggy after dark. The family was as close to reclusive as any I've ever known.

They were also poor. Really poor. What Solomon did for a living remains a mystery to me. I suppose he farmed a bit and had some goats. I don't know what the family ate. Whatever it was, it wasn't much, and it probably wasn't healthy.

Esther was always frail and in poor health and could never seem to get her housework done. My sisters recall being sent over to help Esther clean her house. The Aylmer families took turns, helping her out as needed. Every time a new baby was born to the Herrforts, the neighbors swarmed in and scrubbed the house top to bottom while Esther was at the hospital.

Solomon and Esther had six or seven children. They all wore ill-fitting, ill-made clothes, and they always looked thin, pale, and sickly.

Children of any age and in any culture are pitiless and cruel and run in packs. And heaven help the ones rejected by the pack. The Herrfort children were taunted and tormented as heartlessly as any I have ever witnessed.

Nicholas, the oldest, was born in 1963, sixteen months behind me. He always seemed much younger because he didn't start school until he was seven; almost all the children from other families started at age six. Nicholas was small for his age and always dressed in thin, shabby clothes and worn-out shoes some other family had given him. His front three teeth were missing, and he had a strange haircut. Straight across his forehead above the eyes, then straight back to the ears, then straight down over the ears. It was different. And we mocked and scorned him for it.

In fact, Nicholas Herrfort provided the perfect defenseless target for just about any kind of mockery—simply for the general merriment of the crowd.

“Are you a heifer?” the taunt would begin.

“No, no, Herrfort,” poor Nicholas would respond.

Then again. “Are you a heifer?”

“No, no,
Herrfort
.”

The exchange would be repeated over and over to roars of appreciation and snickers of delight from sadistic onlookers.

Nicholas and his sister Nancy were always the last ones chosen for playground games. And neither of them could sing; their flat, toneless voices rang in jarring dissonance when it was their turn to lead a song. One time, Nancy picked a song that no one knew, and the whole classroom snickered and scoffed at her mistake until she buried her face in her arms on her desk.

I can't imagine what their existence was like, but the Herrfort children must have developed a dull numbness to the cruel horrors that constituted an average day in their threadbare and joyless lives.

Several bullies took a particularly twisted joy in making Nicholas's life miserable. They delighted in torturing and actually hurting him physically. The rest of us did not, but we did stand by and watch. We did nothing to stop it. And it was wrong of us, so very, very wrong. All of it.

The mocking.

The tricks.

The jokes.

The laughter.

The torment.

One particular thing still haunts me. I can see it as clearly in my mind as if it happened yesterday.

The school had an outdoor privy located across the yard from the schoolhouse. When Nicholas needed to go during the noon hour, he knew the bullies were keeping careful watch for him. Lurking furtively inside the safety of the schoolhouse, he waited for his chance to sprint to the privy without interference. When he thought the coast was clear, Nicholas would take off running down the walkway at full speed, legs churning desperately, arms pumping, hair flying behind him. But at least one of the bullies always raced after him. Once he caught up, he would kick Nicholas from behind with all his might, laughing and cackling all the while.

In winter, the bullies delighted in chasing him around to the back side of the schoolhouse, pelting him with iced snowballs and rubbing his face and hair with ice and snow, belittling and cursing him just for being who he was. It bruised him physically. It had to hurt, bad. I can't fathom what it did to him emotionally. And the rest of us did nothing to stop it.

Once, one bully egged on another student, younger and smaller than Nicholas, in the school basement. The younger student ran at Nicholas full speed, grabbed his long hair, and actually swung himself off the ground and around Nicholas. Nicholas stammered and staggered, crying, “Ouch, ouch, ouch.” The bully whooped and clapped and guffawed and cheered. This happened two or three times, and again, we all stood around and watched until another student finally stepped in and stopped it.

The scene still sends shivers of horror down my spine. Especially because I knew better. Nicholas and his sister often walked home the same way we did, and on those walks, I quickly realized that they were both starved for even the tiniest crumb of human kindness. I can still see Nicholas as we walked along the road in the late afternoon sunlight, stammering his words, smiling hesitantly and shyly, and glancing furtively at me now and again to see if I would mock or scorn him. Gaining confidence when I didn't. We had many normal, lighthearted conversations. Laughing and chattering as children do. I suppose that was as close as I ever came to seeing the innocent, relaxed child he would have been in a safer, saner world.

It is no surprise that from the brutal foundation of such a tortured life, Nicholas developed a mental disorder as he grew older. While some of those mental problems likely were genetic, I am convinced that no normal child could have remained emotionally stable after enduring what Nicholas did growing up.

In 1994, the Herrfort family moved to Bland, Virginia. What drew them there I do not know. It was a poor, remote community. Of Nicholas's life at this time, I have few details. Some say that after the move to Virginia, he stopped taking medication for his mental problems. Whatever the facts, I do know that his mental condition deteriorated steadily.

In June 1996, Nicholas's parents decided Nicholas would be better off living with relatives in Aylmer, as he was becoming a bit too much for the family to handle in Virginia.

Nicholas was vehemently opposed to the plan. He did not want to leave Virginia, but his parents insisted. At four thirty on the morning they planned to leave, Nicholas got up and left the house. After the sun rose, he was nowhere to be found.

His family searched and searched. And called and called his name. There was no answer. Sometime around midday, they found him. Lying facedown in a shallow pond just sixteen inches deep. He had taken his own life by drowning. By the time his body was found, the turtles had already eaten away part of his face.

No one can know the depths of his mother's raw and bitter sorrow for her oldest son, her firstborn. I do know, however, that I couldn't stop thinking about Nicholas and all that he had endured. Rather than being accepted and treated as an equal among his peers, he had been rejected and ridiculed simply for being different. My heart ached with regret, wondering how his life might have been different if just one of us had cared enough to be his friend.

They buried Nicholas in a remote country graveyard in Pearisburg, Virginia. A busload of relatives from Aylmer attended the funeral. A simple wooden marker was erected above his grave.

I thought about the shy, stammering, smiling boy who laughed and chattered as we walked along the road in the afternoon sunlight on the way home from school. And then I thought about the cruel injustices inflicted on him by those who should have known better and should have protected such a weak and defenseless child.

We knew who we were. And we know who we are today. We can mourn and grieve our thoughtless and cruel actions. We can say we were just children. We can say we didn't mean it. We can even ask forgiveness from the Herrfort family and from God.

But not from Nicholas. Not ever from Nicholas.

7

My father was a man of many gifts and skills.

Farming was not one of them.

He dutifully tilled the earth and planted the seeds each year, and they produced. But his heart was not in such work. And it showed about the farm. Fences in a state of semi-repair, rusting skeletal hulks of old junk machinery parked about, willy-nilly, in the field just south of the barn. We didn't realize it then, but our farm was just plain trashy.

That's not saying my father was a lazy man or that he didn't provide for his family. Far from it. Dad was a born salesman who loved the art of the deal. He sold nursery stock, fresh produce, and raised and sold purebred Landrace hogs.

Dad was also a gifted dowser, or “water witch”—although he stridently rejected that label. Dowsing has always had a bit of a shady reputation. During the Middle Ages, it was even believed to be from the devil.

It has never been scientifically proven to work, and most people today still view it with suspicion, fear, and skepticism. But growing up, I saw it with my own eyes, many times. If there was water to be found below the ground, not only could my dad locate it, but he could even tell you where to drill for the best flow and the clearest water. His record for accuracy was 100 percent.

Chuck Norman was the local well driller. He was known to everyone as simply “Fine and Dandy,” because that was his automatic response to most questions. He used the phrase to answer anything from a question about how he was feeling to a comment about the weather.

Tall, wiry, and toothless, he was always dressed in stained olive-green coveralls and wore a dented, dirty, yellow hard hat, his ever-present cigarette dangling from his lips or cradled in a grease-blackened hand.

He usually showed up at our farm in the evening, after supper. Dad always walked out and greeted him. “How are you tonight?”

“Fine and dandy. Fine and dandy,” he would reply, smiling his toothless grin and lighting another cigarette.

Dad would then walk out to a tree in the yard and break off a slim, Y-shaped branch. Then with one or two of us boys, he would pile into Fine and Dandy's dilapidated old pickup and we would roar down the gravel road to the place where Fine and Dandy was fixing to drill another well.

Dad would get out of the truck holding his little forked tree branch straight out in front of him, with his palms up and his thumbs out. He would then begin to walk slowly back and forth across the lot in the general area where Fine and Dandy wanted to dig a well.

It must have been quite the sight—an Amish man in a battered, wide-brimmed, black felt hat, holding a forked stick and slowly crisscrossing the yard, while a dirty, chain-smoking roughneck and a ragged little boy in galluses lounged off to the side watching.

Sooner or later, the branch in Dad's hands would lunge downward, quivering, as if alive and pulled by some invisible force.

“This is where you want to drill,” Dad would announce, standing over the spot.

Fine and Dandy would smile his toothless smile, hand Dad a crumpled ten- or twenty-dollar bill, and take us home again in his dilapidated pickup.

Fine and Dandy always drilled exactly on the spot Dad had marked. Sometimes hundreds of feet down. And he always—
always—
found good wells with abundant supplies of fresh, clear water. Thanks to my dad, Fine and Dandy developed quite a reputation as a top-notch driller of wells that never ran dry.

I don't know where Dad's “gift” came from, and I don't know why he had it. Or how it worked. It may have been a latent ability, a remnant of ancient practices, buried deep within the psyche of his Swiss-German heritage. I don't think even he knew quite what it was or why he possessed it.

All he knew was that he had the gift and he could use it.

But when it came to passion and purpose, my father was committed to the one true calling of his heart. He wrote.

For decades he was a scribe for
The Budget
, a weekly newsletter for the Amish and Mennonites, and he developed quite a fan base. By the time I was born, he was already widely known throughout the vast majority of Amish and Mennonite communities in North America—and even overseas. But after he cofounded Pathway Publishers in the late sixties and launched the monthly magazine
Family Life
, his name became legend. Aylmer had been well known before, but after the launch of
Family Life
, it became something akin to a pilgrimage destination for Amish families from other communities.

Family Life
was Dad's baby. His dream. His impossible vision. A magazine published by the Amish, for the Amish. To fund it, he mortgaged the farm (despite my mother's protests).

He must have seemed insane. Such a thing had never been attempted before. But he plodded determinedly forward. He placed ads for subscriptions in
The Budget
, formatted and published the inaugural issue, and then sent it out free to thousands of Amish households across the United States and Canada. Amazingly enough, it worked. Subscriptions poured in, eventually reaching thirty thousand.