My People, the Amish: The True Story of an Amish Father and Son

by Keim, Joe

  Finally, one of the men, Jonas, stood and cleared his throat. He said, “Friends, listen closely. Your problem is not whether one should or shouldn’t wear bright orange when hunting deer; neither does having or not having bulk milk tanks have anything to do with all the division and anger coming from this community.” He waited a moment for his words to sink in. “All this confusion, anger, bitterness, and division could have easily been avoided if you had heeded God’s command, when He said: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself (Mark 12:31).”

  They had lost their first love and their love for each other. As more rules and regulations were invented to control life, bickering and comparing of each other occurred. When I was a little boy, the Weavers, who were neighbors, came to our house to discuss church issues. My parents never told me what the issues were, but I do know the Weavers were very angry and determined to be heard. The meeting between my parents and the Weavers got so intense, I could hear them yelling at each other from another building. Many in the community had forgotten, or were totally ignoring, the teaching of the apostle Paul about their walk in Christ.

  Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross ... Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days (Colossians 2:14, 16).

  Such disagreements and tensions cause divisions in many denominations, and the Amish are no different in this respect.

  Chapter 2

  Growing up Amish

  Now that you know how I came to be Amish, let me tell you about who I am. My name is Joe Keim, the oldest of fourteen children. I’m named after my Uncle Joe. One of my brothers died when he was a couple of weeks old, so Dad and Mom raised thirteen children. While most Amish depend on a midwife during the birthing process at home, my arrival into the world was somewhat unique. I was born in the hospital. No one ever told me why, but I’ve always assumed my mom had some complications and needed to be in a hospital atmosphere in case something went wrong.

  My hospital birth reminds me of a short story that, while fictional, sheds a little light on the Amish mindset.

  Grandma and Grandpa came to the hospital to visit their new grandchild. They arrived on the second floor and stood before a window where they viewed all of the newborns lined up so people could walk by and see their little faces. First Grandma and Grandpa tried to decide which one was their grandchild. At the moment they found him, they separated him from all the others saying, “He’s such a lucky baby. He could have been born into an English family, but God favored him by choosing otherwise. As soon as we get him out of this hospital, we will take him home and dress him in Amish clothes. He will learn the Amish dialect, attend Amish school, and learn Amish ways. When he is old enough, he will join the Amish church, marry an Amish wife, raise an Amish family, and die in his Amish clothes. If he follows through and does all this well, there’s a good chance he will get to heaven.”

  As I grew older, more and more siblings joined the family. My parents never told me where babies came from. They just mysteriously appeared. Whenever a birth took place during the day, Dad and Mom would send us children out of the house, and when we returned, we had another newborn baby. On one occasion, they sent us out to strip the sorghum leaves. Sorghum is a tall cane that resembles field corn with a cone-shaped seed head filled with BB-sized seeds.

  As each one of us walked out the door single file, my father gave strict orders, “Don’t leave the sorghum field until I invite you back to the house.”

  We were clueless as to what was happening, and quickly followed orders. Hour after hour went by as we stripped leaves from one stalk after another. Our hands hurt and dirt covered the entire front of our bodies. Hunger pangs set in and time stopped moving. Did our father forsake us? Did he forget?

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, Dad appeared with a huge smile on his face. “Come here,” he said. “Mom and I have a surprise for you children.”

  As we followed Dad out of the field and toward the house, he built our level of excitement. We loved surprises and couldn’t wait to see what it was. When we finally got to the house, Dad led us into the kitchen, through the living room, and all the way to our parents’ bedroom. There was Mom lying on the bed with a tiny little baby by her side.

  As we stared wide-eyed at our new brother, Mom simply said, “An angel dropped him off.”

  At this time in my life, I believed everything Dad and Mom told us. With all the excitement, I never thought to ask questions, but gladly took my turn holding our newest brother. I walked away wondering what the angel looked like. Did he have wings? How long did he stick around after dropping our little brother off?

  As I got older, things began to make more sense. I started noticing that whenever Mom’s waistline bulged, she stopped attending the bi-weekly church services. This happened about a month before another baby was “dropped off,” but the word sex or even the term having babies was never mentioned.

  I was about thirteen when I first heard about sex and where babies came from. I was hanging out behind the barn with some of my first cousins. Paul, my oldest cousin, knew more about this stuff than the rest of us, and he shared bits and pieces of what he had heard. We laughed hysterically. In fact, each one of us boys laughed and joked until the tears rolled down our cheeks.

  I could go on, but you get the drift. My view of sexuality from the very beginning was twisted; at best, it was half-truth and half-lie. If a mature grownup had talked to me about this topic, the barnyard discussion would never have taken place the way it did.

  Let me go one step further. If a mature grownup, specifically our parents, would have taken the time to sit down with each one of us at home and discuss the truth about sex and pregnancy, we may very well have looked at sex as the gift from God that it is. Rather than sex becoming a joke and a dirty word, we may have realized sex was something beautiful and worth waiting for until we got married. Instead, everything but that happened.

  My Father

  To say my dad was hard working is an understatement. He owned a blacksmith and machine shop, a vitamin and herb store, and also owned and operated a 200-acre farm. He wrote several books, and people, not just the Amish, considered him to be the community veterinarian and came to him for help. He even shoed show horses. In addition to caring for the animals, he served as the community dentist and pulled teeth for the Amish. But the thing he is probably most known for is the burn salve he invented. Most Amish households have a small white plastic jar of B&W Ointment in their medicine cabinets, and it’s even used in some US hospitals. He has spoken at several hundred seminars and trained and certified hundreds of Amish people on how to apply his burn salve and use dried burdock leaves. As a result, he knows and works with many medical doctors and hospitals in the US.

  My local chiropractor once shared how my father asked him to taxi him to an out-of-town doctor’s meeting where more than one hundred medical doctors from all over the country had planned to meet. When they arrived, they got out of the car, walked across the parking lot, and entered the building.

  “Joe, no kidding, we entered that room, and many of those doctors knew your father by his first name,” he said. My chiropractor told how he stood in awe as he watched my father, the only Amish man in the whole place, walk around and shake hands with highly educated doctors and participate in deep, college-level discussions.

  As you can see, to say Dad was a very busy man doesn’t begin to cover it. With so many outside commitments, he didn’t have a lot of time for his family, and I felt neglected – as if Dad’s goals in life and his customers were far more important than me. When we did have time together, he often pointed out things we didn’t do well enough. That was it. No time for real conversation or just talking about the day. Just enough time to let me know I didn’t measure up to his expe
ctations.

  In my mind, he seemed frustrated and short tempered because he was so busy helping people outside of the family. Eventually, in my teen years, my feelings led to a disconnect between us.

  Dad farmed organically, and his approach to good health was the all-natural approach. He strongly believed in vitamins and herbs and frowned on having any cakes or pies. However, Dad loved fruit, and around Christmastime he treated us to whole boxes of oranges and grapefruit.

  We looked forward to Dad bringing home fruit, and sometimes Dad brought home pineapple, which is one of the sweetest fruits and has great medicinal value. Now, I know cleanses are all the rage these days, but I can tell you firsthand they are nothing new. Dad asked my whole family to go on a three-day pineapple diet because it would clean us out – “worms and all.” While pineapples are deliciously sweet, they are very acidic. By the third day of a pineapple-only diet, my sore mouth burned with every bite. And we dared not eat anything but pineapple, because Dad wouldn’t stand for it. At the time, it was NO laughing matter, but now I admit, it gives me a chuckle.

  My Mother

  Mom, on the other hand, was a very caring mother who loved us children unconditionally. I enjoyed a close relationship with her and often poured my life troubles out to her while she sat silent with a long-caring face that told me she really listened. In the end, she always said the right words to make me feel things were going to be okay.

  Mom was also a hard worker. Not only did she hand sew all our clothes and make us three meals a day, she also planted two large gardens, did all the fall canning, helped Dad in the shop, and lent a hand with the milking every morning and evening. We bought our butter and cheese from the man who picked up our milk, but Mom always made our bread. We seldom had pie or cake, though, simply because Dad thought these foods had too much sugar. This often raised contention between my dad and mom. Looking back over my childhood years, I wonder in amazement how she was able to do all she did. She was a gifted wife and mother.

  Mom had a few breakdowns, which usually happened at night after we went to bed. On one of these occasions, my father woke us in the middle of the night and said, “Get up and come downstairs as quickly as possible. Mom is dying!”

  Within seconds, we were all wide awake and ran to Mom’s side. As we gathered around her side of the bed, we saw her struggling and gasping for one more breath of life. Her face was pale, and she couldn’t even talk to us. We stood there, looking down at one of the greatest mothers of all time. My heart hammered so hard it felt like it was going to jump right out of my body. My chest ached from the pounding, and I felt totally helpless. We all thought this was it. Mom was going to die right before our eyes. Tears trickled down the side of my face, and my body trembled in fear. In unison, our family began to call out to God, asking Him to spare our precious mother’s life.

  Looking back at it now, I’m not sure why we didn’t call an ambulance. It may have been because the nearest phone was owned by an English family, two miles away. It may have been because it was in the middle of the night and Mom seemed to be too far gone. In the end, Mom hung in there; within days, she started feeling better and going about her daily routine.

  Family Life

  When it came to meals, we had to eat what was set before us. Personally, one of the most difficult things to eat was soft-boiled eggs. Mom, at my father’s request, boiled dozens of these eggs for three minutes on the wood-burning stove. It took a good thirty minutes to get the stove hot enough to boil eggs. They were then placed before us on the table, we stirred them into homemade breadcrumbs.

  My problem was the chalazae. If you’ve never heard that word, you might know it as the slimy things, the whitish strands of goo that anchor the yoke to the center of the thick, white membrane. For me, that goo was the thing that made me gag. And the fresher the eggs, the more prevalent the strands. I’d stir that egg and breadcrumb mixture until I found every slimy strand, and when no one was looking, I picked them out of my bowl and smeared them on the board under the table where they stuck like glue and grew hard. Over time, they built up into a hard lump of plastered egg white slime, but at least I avoided the egg-gagging scene.

  * * * *

  Bathing in our family was not like bathing in English homes. We took a bath once a week on Saturday nights, which was the norm for the whole Amish community. When we were young, Mom heated the water on our wood-burning stove and poured the hot water into a long, galvanized tub. She’d add some cold water to make it comfortably warm, and a couple of children bathed at a time. With all the hard work around the farm in the summer, the water grew dreadfully dirty.

  There’s an old saying, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” which comes from a time when everyone in the family bathed in the same bathwater once a year. The man of the house was first, then the mother, followed by the children, with the youngest going last. The water became so dirty it was opaque, which made it hard to see the baby in the bath. Well in my house, it was bad enough bathing once a week, even though we went swimming most summer evenings. The younger children bathed before the older, and by the time I climbed in the grungy gray water, I couldn’t imagine how it could clean me; I hated being the last.

  Sleeping arrangements with so many children also added an interesting element to life. While some of my younger brothers and sisters slept downstairs with Dad and Mom, most of us slept in the four upstairs bedrooms of our two-story farmhouse. The door at the bottom of the stairs was attached to a spring that automatically pulled the door shut in five seconds. Since we didn’t have electric lights, we’d open the door all the way to light the stairwell enough to see. Then we’d race up the stairs as fast as we could before the door closed. Once that door clicked closed behind us, the hallway turned pitch black. From that point on, we’d feel our way through the dark until we got to our bed.

  My father had taught us to kneel by our bedside every night and pray, and no matter how tired we were, we always prayed that God would watch over us. During the winter months, our bedroom temperature was so cold we could see our breath in the daytime. Snow leaked in through the edge of the small sliding windows and sometimes covered parts of the sill and edge of our bed. My brother Ervin and I would crawl under those ice-cold blankets and lie in bed with our backs turned against each other and cover up with heavy comforters that Mom had made for us.

  Since there were twice as many boys as girls in our family, the boys claimed three of the four bedrooms. At the top of the stairs, you’d walk right into the first room. The oldest of my sisters slept in the room to the right, which had no door. A third room was farther around on the other side of the stairs, and the door to the left led to the room I shared with my brother Ervin. All of our beds were bought secondhand, and with so many children, we all had to double up in bed. Ervin and I were very close and slept in the same soft double bed that slanted toward the front.

  During the summer months, we all went barefoot and most of the time Ervin didn’t wash his feet. He often fell asleep before bedtime, and the mud caked on his feet dried and crumbled between the sheets. When I’d climb into bed, the springs and mattress creaked beneath my weight as I brushed and swept the mud crumbs away so I could sleep. But after working hard all day, I fell asleep within minutes.

  Dissension Grows

  I don’t know if it’s because I was the oldest or because it’s what Dad expected, but I was a “goody-goody-two-shoes” kind of guy for the first fifteen years of my life. I never broke rules like some of the other children in our community, but always toed the line. At age fifteen, however, that all started to change.

  Life for Dad was always black and white with no gray areas. His expectations and perfectionist personality for me as a young boy seemed unreachable at the time. As I transitioned from childhood into adulthood and went through hormonal changes, my voice grew deeper and my physical appearance changed. My m
ind dwelt on friends and girls much of the time. In the midst of all these big changes, I wanted to pull away from my parents, become independent, and make more decisions on my own. But I didn’t have that freedom, and I certainly wasn’t encouraged or guided in that direction. A simmering anger and resentment threatened to boil over within me.

  Furthermore, Dad was very talented and was pulled in so many directions that he had little time to recognize the struggles of his eldest son. My mental and physical changes and his stressed lifestyle provided the perfect explosive mix. Looking back, I realize he was doing his best to bring me up with good morals and an honest, strong work ethic. But what I desperately longed for was encouragement and affirmation. I don’t remember ever getting a hug from Dad or hearing him tell me that he loved me, but that’s not uncommon in the Amish community. Most Amish people don’t show affection. It’s just the way it was. In fact, the word love isn’t in the Pennsylvania Dutch vocabulary – the closest word for love is like.

  When I hit my teens, my relationship with Dad deteriorated, so by the time I was fifteen, I often looked down at my feet when he gave me the day’s work list. The work list was always verbal. The conversation was mostly one way – Dad telling us what he wanted done, and we took it from there. The frustration built in both directions. He was just as exasperated with me. One day when he met me coming around the barn, his body tensed. His frustration ignited and anger got the best of him.

  “You are worthless. I don’t even know why I feed you,” he said.

  What I wanted more than anything else in life was for my father to pat me on the back and say, “I know you are going through difficult changes in your life, but I love you just the way you are.” I so desperately wanted my father to believe in me, even if he found it hard to do. I thought, If my father treated me like he did his customers and cared about the things I cared about, life would be so much easier and satisfying.