Why I Left the Amish

by Saloma Miller Furlong

  The next morning, Lizzie and I figured out by the sounds coming from the kitchen that Aunt Katie was making breakfast instead of Mem. We dreaded going downstairs, but we also knew that if we got up too late, Grandmother and Aunt Katie would shame us for it. So, we tiptoed down the stairs and stood in the kitchen doorway. Grandmother sat at the table, spooning oatmeal into Baby Simon's mouth. Aunt Katie was making pancakes and eggs over the cookstove in her usual shusslich (clumsy) manner. When she saw us in the doorway, she said, “Lizzie, come set the table! Lomie, take your thumb out of your mouth!” She turned and stomped towards the table with a stack of pancakes. I went and picked up my doll from the toy box for comfort in place of sucking my thumb, but before breakfast was over, Aunt Katie took my doll away from me and I never saw her again.

  It was Grandmother who told Mem and Datt not to tell us children why Mem had been taken to the hospital. When Datt came home the next morning, looking more tired than I'd ever seen him, he hung his hat on the peg on the wall next to the stairway. I came up behind him and asked, “When is Mem coming home with the baby?” I was going by what Joey said—that the reason mothers go to the hospital is to buy a baby. Datt walked by me and didn't answer. The dejected look on his face silenced me. I wondered if Mem was going to come home at all.

  She did come home several days later, but she didn't bring a baby with her. I thought maybe Mem had really been sick instead of going to the hospital to “buy” a baby. A few days after she came home, Mem stood in the living room, holding a clear pump with a red ball over her breast. She squeezed the ball, and milk flowed into the pump as tears fell quietly down her cheeks. I touched her arm and asked her what was wrong. She only looked out the window towards the far end of the field on the other side of the road and shook her head. I wanted so much to make her feel better, but all I could do was watch her cry.

  I had completely forgotten these events until I was in my early teens and we were visiting my cousin's gravesite. We were with Aunt Lizzie and my cousins Marie and Maudie. Aunt Lizzie had had four stillborn children, and she was standing by their graves. They were all lined up in a row, the little gravestones simply saying, “Stillborn Daughter [or Son] of Albert and Lizzie Kuntz,” along with the dates.

  Mem walked over to the row of pine trees that was the border between the graveyard and Uncle Ervin's farm. There she knelt by a little gravestone.

  I walked over and looked at it: “Stillborn Son of Simon S. Miller.”

  “Mem,” I said, “I didn't know you had lost a child.”

  “Sure you did,” she said and stood up briskly. “You remember when we had a baby that died, don't you? It was after Simon was born and before Katherine.”

  “Why didn't you tell us?”

  “Grandmother told Datt and me it would be better not to tell you children.”

  I asked, “But why does this gravestone only have Datt's name and not yours?”

  “Datt made a mistake. But don't say anything about it.”

  Aunt Lizzie called to Mem, and she walked away. I stood still, staring down at the little gravestone I had never even known was there before, feeling hollow and sad. If I had only known what had happened when I was a child, it could have been so much less confusing and frightening. Grandmother's stern dominance of Mem and Datt had not allowed us to know the simple truth—that the baby we expected she would bring home from the hospital had died.

  I HEARD FOOTSTEPS coming up the stairs and realized I'd been sitting at the kitchen table, staring out the window for a long time. It was time to go and collect my mail from the Campus Center. I headed up to my room for my keys, and then down two flights of stairs to the street level. The fresh autumn air smelled good as I headed across campus. I kept thinking about Grandmother and wondering what my father would have been like if he had grown up with a different mother. Brother Joe once said that he would much rather have had Datt for a father than Grandmother for a mother. I was in my early teens at the time, and I couldn't have imagined a parent worse than my father. But Joe had a point—just having her for a grandmother was quite bad enough.

  I remembered the day my fear of her had turned into hate.

  I HAD BEEN GIVEN a doll as a gift from someone who noticed that I took good care of Sister Katherine when she was a baby. She was my favorite doll—she had a knob on her back that made her arms and legs move, and she had blue eyes that closed when I laid her down. She had a soft cloth body that made her feel more like a real baby than regular plastic dolls.

  One day, when I was about eight years old, Grandmother and Aunt Katie drove into the lane. Mem said quietly, “Girls, go hide your dolls!” I stuck Heidi behind the couch. As it turned out, the hiding place was not good enough. When they left at the end of the day, my doll was nowhere to be found. A few days later, I found the top of her burned head in the pile of leaves in the woods. I felt the part of my heart that I thought should have loved my aunt and my grandmother turn to stone. I imagined my grandmother's body, tall and thin, clothed in a black dress, lying in a coffin. My mother thought it was a sin to wish someone dead, but I could not help it. I had never known such a feeling as what burned in my chest that day as I ran deep into the woods and screamed and sobbed out my fear and hatred of black-widow Grandmother.

  Several years later, Grandmother and Aunt Katie moved to Wisconsin, and they only visited us once in a while after that. Uncle Sam's and Uncle Gid's families had already moved to Cashton, Wisconsin, where a new Amish settlement had been started with people moving from our community and from Iowa. The Cashton community was stricter than our own. After the uncles and their families and Grandmother and Aunt Katie had all moved out, they put a great deal of pressure on Mem and Datt to move their family to Cashton, too. It was one of the only times I was glad that Datt was so attached to his land. Even though I always had a fantasy about moving, I knew I didn't want to move to a stricter community, and I sure didn't want to be near Grandmother and Aunt Katie.

  Grandmother was in her seventies the last time she traveled to Ohio. My uncles and aunts had also traveled from Wisconsin and New York State for a family reunion. She made a big point of telling all of us that this was to be her last trip, implying that she was then going back to Wisconsin to die soon thereafter.

  The uncles got to joking the night everyone got together at our house. They all had a quick sense of humor, and they fed off one another. Some of us were crying from laughing so hard. Mem's bosom bounced as she laughed her quiet laugh that reddened her face. Even Datt, who was usually the last to laugh, was showing his toothless gums in exuberant laughter. I looked at Grandmother to see whether she was laughing. Sure enough, there was a smile playing at the corners of her mouth. Then she suddenly looked very serious and said, “You all are going to cry just as hard as you are laughing right now!” Uncle Gid said, “Well, I hope it will be as much fun!” The uncles bantered about a bit more, but the mood was lost. Grandmother had managed to smother the fun as effectively as if she had thrown a blanket over it.

  Grandmother was right—this was her last trip to Ohio, but she didn't die for another twenty years.

  Datt's obsession with death was something else Grandmother passed on to him. And they had a similar outlook on life in the sense that they seemed to have the fatalistic attitude that life happens to you, and there isn't anything you can do about it. They both expected the worst out of life, and they both got the worst out of life. Grandmother prolonged her death—we kept hearing she was on her way out for five years before she finally died, at ninety-four years old. Now, ten years later, Datt was finally reaching the end of his life, the moment he had been practicing for his whole life long.

  WHEN I GOT BACK to my room, I thought about studying more for my German class the next day, but I was too distracted. I prepared for bed, sat down on my hickory rocker with a book, but I couldn't concentrate. I put it aside and snuggled into bed. I thought about how my fear of Datt had changed over the years. Part of the nature of my fear of him as a child was
that I knew there was something wrong with Datt's mind, though I still didn't have words for “mental illness.” And to this day I don't know what changed in Datt to make him go from being depressed to becoming intermittently depressed and violent. As each of us children became older and showed signs of developing our independence, he started to resort to violence, and my fears became reality.

  Joe, being the oldest, was the first target of Datt's rage. I remember a beating Datt gave Joe when he was about fifteen years old. In the double doorway between the dining room and the living room, Datt whipped Joe with a belt, hard, so that Joe's heels came off the floor with each crack across his backside. Normally Datt whipped until we cried, and then he'd stop. We had learned to cry immediately. This time Joe stuck his hands in his pockets and refused to cry. I had been drying dishes at the counter. I wondered how he could stand it. When Joe didn't cry after several hits, Datt grabbed onto the belt with both hands and cracked it across Joe's back, nearly knocking him off his feet. Joe's white face was set in stone. Then all of a sudden his knees buckled and he fell to the floor.

  Frozen with fear, I couldn't utter a sound. My memory of what happened next has completely vanished. It is as if I saw only part of a film. Perhaps my mind was protecting itself in not recording the level of fear I felt.

  It was the last time Joe took a beating from Datt without fighting back. From the time he was sixteen to the time he left home, Joe and Datt had physical fights—once in a barn where a church service was being held, with other men around. The bishop's son was among those witnessing the fight. He looked at the other men and said, “Shouldn't we be doing something about this?”

  When Joe left home to get married, we sighed in relief, thinking that would be the end of Datt's violence. But instead of ending, his violence was now turned on the girls as each of us reached the age of normal adolescent rebellion.

  I find it surprising that Datt did not get into the habit of hitting Mem. I remember him hitting her only once. The two of them were arguing out in the yard when he turned and punched her in the chest, just once, and then drew his hand back, as if it had betrayed him. Most of the time, even in his rages he seemed to have the self-control not to hit her. Sister Susan remembers another time, when we were sitting at the supper table, when Datt hit Mem. Joe, who was in his late teens at the time, stood up and told Datt that he would never hit Mem again—or else he, Joe, would hit Datt back. Susan attributes the fact that Datt didn't habitually hit Mem to Joe's standing up to Datt. I am not so sure. I think that on some level, Datt knew the difference between hitting his daughters, who in his mind he was “disciplining”—and hitting Mem. He knew he could not survive without her.

  I AWOKE TO A SERIES of loud bangs right outside my window. It was the garbage truck emptying the dumpster. I looked at my clock and wondered why they had to do it so early in the morning—it was just after 6:00 a.m. I tried to go back to sleep, but I suddenly remembered Datt, and how I still had to decide whether to stay at Smith or travel to Ohio. I asked myself what I would regret if I did not go visit him. Then I realized that I might not have any regrets, because in the past fifteen years, I had established a relationship with Datt that I knew was as good as it was going to get. It was difficult to achieve this, because the rest of the family did not see Datt as a person—whenever they visited, they talked with Mem, and everyone ignored Datt altogether. Over the years, my siblings had, in different degrees, bought into the myth that Mem had created, that Datt was a complete failure as our parent and as a person, while Mem could do no wrong. I found it was not so clear-cut: Datt's good attributes were ignored in the same way that Mem's faults were unrecognized. In my view, one of her faults was to ignore Datt when we visited—she actually treated him as if he were a piece of furniture. Sometimes she went as far as talking about Datt in front of him, as if he were not there.

  I wanted to change this pattern of treating Datt like a nonperson. During one of my visits home, I asked Datt about his railroad days, and he became all animated, and motioned as he spoke, telling me how his head had gotten caught between two train cars. One of the people he worked with saw what had happened and alerted the engineer, who pulled the cars forward, freeing Datt's head.

  Mem's reaction to my new behavior was interesting. She interrupted and said, “Datt, that's not how it happened . . . !”

  I asked Mem, “Were you there?”

  “No, but that's not how he told me the story . . .”

  As soon as Mem interrupted, Datt stopped rocking in his bent hickory rocker, with his feet crossed, and listened meekly.

  I knew Mem wanted me to ask her how he had told the story before, which would have brought the conversation back to the way she was used to—with her doing the talking, and he being the nonperson. I didn't ask her. Instead I said, “Mem, let him talk.”

  Datt took up his story where he had left off.

  I wasn't that surprised when Mem burst into tears, for I had always known that Mem used her tears to manipulate people's sympathies. I ignored her and kept my focus on what Datt was saying.

  When Mem saw I wasn't responding, she dried her crocodile tears and sat on her hands and pouted.

  David and I engaged Datt in conversations after that, and we brought him maple popcorn from the Log Cabin in Burton, where he used to sell his maple syrup. Whenever I wrote Mem a letter, I also wrote to Datt. He wrote back, even though his handwriting looked like he was still in the fifth grade, which was the last year of school he had completed, and some of the letters were not that coherent—but I felt honored that he wrote them, all the same. Then in one letter, he had clearly stopped writing in mid-sentence. The letter made no sense, and I knew his letter-writing days were probably over.

  In this process of seeing Datt for who he was, I found I had forgiven him. To fully forgive him, I needed to understand how he could have committed the wrongs he did. With his mental illness and with his level of intelligence, perhaps he could not have made different choices than the ones he made. This was borne out when his violence ceased after he began to take medication for his illness twenty-five years ago. I could not hold him as responsible as someone who was intelligent and deliberately set out to hurt others.

  I STRETCHED AND LOOKED out over the roof of the science building. I felt like I needed to pinch myself to make sure I was awake, because sometimes it was almost too much to grasp that I was realizing my lifelong dream of attending college.

  It was soon time for my ethics class, in which we were discussing Plato, one of my favorite philosophers. The professor had an unassuming style, outfitted in his Birkenstocks and flannel shirts. He had a way of examining issues that invited us to turn them around and look at them from all sides. I found this approach liberating, and I looked forward to each one of his classes.

  As I stood under the warm shower, I remembered the magic of my very first class at Smith. It was astronomy, and the professor, who is from Pakistan, had put up a slide on the overhead projector of a child sitting on a sandy beach. He started out the class by saying, in his lilting accent, that there are more galaxies in the universe than there are grains of sand on earth. He also said that scientists today do not know whether the universe is finite or infinite. “But,” he said, “we do know that there are an infinite number of mysteries in the universe.” I had the feeling as I sat in this class that my mind was expanding, so that it could absorb all these incredible ideas I was being exposed to. This was the world in which I belonged, the same way Datt was in the world in which he belonged, surrounded by family members and people from his Amish community. I decided that I would stay at Smith for now and travel back for his funeral. I knew that the reason I could make this decision with a clear conscience is because I had made peace with him. I breathed a prayer of gratitude for this blessing.

  A Frolic

  Good works are links that form a chain of love.

  MOTHER TERESA

  Later that same day as I walked across campus, I called Sister Susan. We had
been emailing back and forth constantly since Datt had gone into the hospital and subsequently gone back home. Susan said Datt was doing about the same as he had been, although they were now giving him morphine every four hours to relieve his coughing. She said that he was sometimes aware, and other times he wasn't.

  “Speaking of being aware, I was thinking again of what Datt said to you and Sarah when you two visited him in the hospital.”

  “You mean when he said he felt bad that ‘you girls are not going to get an inheritance’?”

  “Yes. That took a tremendous amount of awareness, which I didn't think he was capable of. First of all, even if he was aware of what that meant to us, I would have thought he wouldn't care that we aren't going to end up with much of an inheritance because we left the Amish. But the most amazing thing to me is that it's the kind of thing that fathers think about when they're dying. I didn't think Datt had any paternal feelings for his children. It seems like he does in this case. And not only that, but I would have thought because all of us girls have left the Amish, he wouldn't want us to have any inheritance, even if he had paternal feelings for us.”

  “I know! I cannot tell you how surprised Sarah and I were by that. Did I tell you what Mem's reaction was when we mentioned that?”

  “I don't think you did.”

  “She got really defensive. She said, ‘But you are getting an inheritance. Joe and Emma have been paying into an account for that all along!’”

  “Interesting. Why do you think she was so defensive?”

  “I don't know. I wondered the same thing.”

  “Do you know if there will be any inheritance at all, or what the plan is for that?”

  “You once told me that Joe and Emma are paying into an account to pay for the farm, but I don't know much more than that.”