MEN OF LANCASTER COUNTY 01: The Amish Groom

by Mindy Starns Clark

  But Rachel wasn’t giving up that easily. The next day, she tried again, this time taking a seat on the swing beside mine and saying, “Tell me about your mother. What was she like?” Obviously, someone had filled her in, at least a little bit. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have put it quite that way.

  I wanted to rebuff her, but again, her question left me silent and confused. What had my mother been like? Did I even know anymore? I still had some memories of her, of course, but Rachel had asked me not for memories but for a description.

  Sitting on the swing, my toes digging a rut into the dry, dusty ground at my feet, I tried to picture my mom. I could barely recall her face by that point, though I could still hear the faintest echoes of her voice, sometimes in English, sometimes in the Pennsylvania Dutch she’d grown up speaking.

  What else?

  I remembered her smile, from when we lived in Germany and I found three pfennigs in the street as she and I walked to the backerei to buy bread.

  I remembered her eyes, from when she watched me blow out the candles on a cake she’d baked for my birthday—white frosting with sprinkles on top, just like I’d asked for.

  I remembered her long brown hair, flowing out behind her as we pedaled down the street together on our bicycles.

  Of course, that had been back when we still lived in Germany. I couldn’t remember moving out of our house in Heidelberg or the long airplane ride to the States, but I remembered my mother calling her parents once we were settled into our new home in Maryland to tell them we had returned from overseas at last. I remembered that conversation well, remembered hearing her say that we wanted to come for a visit. But then after she hung up the phone, she just cried for a long time. And that visit never happened. I never even met my grandparents, in fact, until the day of the funeral, the day they took me home and my old life came to an end and my new one began.

  “My mother?” I said finally, turning to Rachel. “She was smart and funny and nice and everybody liked her.” Glancing her way, I couldn’t help but add, “She wasn’t Amish, you know. Neither is my dad.”

  I could still see Rachel’s face in that moment, the hurt in her big blue eyes. I could still feel the shame burning my cheeks, shame at the way I had said the word “Amish,” as though it was something to be disdained, as though I wasn’t wearing Amish clothes myself or living an Amish life, day after day, in my grandparents’ Amish home.

  Once again she had walked away without a word. That was on a Friday, and I felt bad all weekend long about what I’d said. When I saw her again that Monday at school, I was ready to apologize. But before I could, she simply came up to me and gestured across the playground toward the swings. We ran there together, and that time we didn’t just hang still but instead tried to get ourselves going. By pushing off with our feet and pumping our legs, over and over—leaning back, stretching out, leaning forward, curling under—we eventually went so high we were nearly perpendicular to the ground.

  “We’re going to swing to the moon!” she cried.

  “We’re going to swing to the sun!” I responded.

  “We’re going to swing all the way to heaven!” she said. “All the way up to your mother!”

  I glanced at her, but she wasn’t making fun. She wasn’t even pretending, really. She was just trying to make me feel better, to say something kind. That was the first I became aware of Rachel’s gift for compassion.

  “All the way up to heaven,” I agreed, and in the look we shared as we soared toward the sky, I knew all would be well between us from that moment forward.

  THREE

  After our tasks at the Bowmans’ were done, Jake and I had just enough time to go home to get cleaned up and dressed before coming back for the wedding. In our district, weddings were always held on Tuesdays and Thursdays from October to December. That seemed like a lot of time to fit all of them in, but in densely populated Lancaster County, getting that many young couples married off in such a short amount of time was nearly impossible. Jake had pulled out a calendar once and done the math, and those Tuesdays and Thursdays each fall added up to a total of less than thirty possible days per year on which to hold a wedding. For the people in our district, that meant running like crazy for three months, attending at least one or two weddings per week and struggling to decide between the numerous options that inevitably popped up. Having been through seventeen such seasons myself since coming to live with my grandparents, I’d seen many a couple take their marriage vows. But I was definitely more aware of the details at Anna and Tobias’s wedding ceremony than I had been at any of those in the past.

  During the long service I sat with the men as usual, but my gaze kept wandering over to where Rachel sat on the women’s side, in the front row. Looking at her, I pondered the notion that this was most likely my last wedding season as a bachelor. If she and I became engaged soon, as everyone expected us to, then Jake was right. Next fall, I would be a groom.

  For that to happen, though, I would also need to be a baptized member of the Amish church. While I embraced that idea in theory, in reality I wasn’t so sure. That would mean no more dawns spent gazing into my mother’s pond and wondering what was on the other side, no more sunsets spent thinking of Rachel and wondering if this really was the life I wanted. The time for wondering would be over. The time for commitment would begin.

  Rachel had been done with her wondering a few years ago, taking her baptismal vows when she was nineteen. She’d had her rumspringa like the rest of us, but over time she had worked through all her questions and doubts about becoming Amish and decided to make that commitment for life. While my period of rumpspringa continued to drag on, she had slowly outgrown the youth gatherings and lost the itch to see movies or own a cell phone or wear Englisch clothing. When I was eighteen and wanted to get a driver’s license, she helped me study for the written test, but she had no desire to get one of her own. She never made me feel silly or sinful for wanting it, but she did ask me what was the draw in having something that, as an Amish man, I would never use. I’d told her I wanted to see what it was like to drive a motor vehicle, not just sit in one while someone else drove.

  What I hadn’t added was that my dad was a collector of muscle cars—something that would have been foreign to her indeed. Though I didn’t visit him often, when I did he would always ask if I wanted to take out his latest acquisition for a spin. If I had a license, I could be the one behind the wheel. Besides, if I really was going to become Amish someday, that meant I would never own a car of my own, and I wanted to know what it was I would be turning my back on.

  Now, as the minister began the main sermon, I looked again at Rachel and it struck me that she was walking the path she’d been set on since the day she was born. From a young age, she’d been able to see herself living the life her parents lived and their parents before them and their parents before them. She’d been given an unbroken heritage that surely felt as solid as the earth beneath her feet.

  My situation was more complicated than that. What I had was a mother who had left the Amish faith when she was just eighteen for reasons no one had ever been able to explain. I had an Englisch father who couldn’t get rid of me fast enough once she died, suddenly and unexpectedly, of a brain aneurism. I had a pair of loving Amish grandparents who had taken me in and raised me as one of their own, even though I’d known nothing at all prior to that about them or what they believed or what their lives were like.

  My heritage was about as broken as they come. Sometimes, I felt broken too.

  Yet there sat Rachel on her side of the room, her attention rapt as Anna and Tobias spoke their promises to the bishop, the congregation, and each other. As they did, Rachel never once looked away from what was happening in front of her. Watching her watch them, I felt a sudden surge of emotion—guilt, pain, grief—so intense I could barely breathe.

  How could I do this to her? How could I keep putting her off, making her wait? I loved Rachel more than life itself, I knew that. But to love her
for the rest of her life as her husband meant loving the church as well.

  And that was something I just didn’t know if I could do.

  What if, in the end, I simply couldn’t bring myself to join the Amish faith? What would happen to us then? As a baptized member of the church, Rachel didn’t have the freedom to walk away the way I did. If I left, my grandparents and other family members would be hurt and disappointed, of course, but we could always maintain a relationship. I would always be welcome in their home.

  If Rachel left, she would probably be excommunicated. Not only would her loved ones be brokenhearted, but they would likely cut all ties with her, shunning her for the rest of her life—or at least until she repented and came back to the church. Bottom line, unless I joined the church too, she was caught in an either/or situation. She could have me, or she could have her Amish world, but she couldn’t have both.

  What kind of person was I to force a choice like that on the woman I loved?

  My heart pounded at the thought, but I tried to swallow back a feeling of despair and focus on the situation at hand. None of this had to be decided today, I told myself. There was still plenty of time to figure things out.

  I somehow managed to make it through the rest of the service. Once it ended, I found a welcome distraction in helping Jake and the rest of the cousins move the benches to the barn, where the feasting tables had been set up. By the time we were finished, my mind was no longer on questions about the future but instead was tuned in to the heaping platters and bowls of food that graced the tables of the reception.

  The abundant display revealed how much we had all missed the wedding feasts during the long summer months. Spread out before us were pickled beets, cucumbers, and eggs; giant bowls of salads; five kinds of bread and a dozen varieties of jams and preserves; ham and beef; four kinds of chow-chow; baked lima beans, baked cabbage, and baked corn casserole; mashed sweet potatoes, boiled new potatoes and green beans, and potato dumplings; spicy carrots; and four kinds of roasted squash.

  Unlike at other communal feasts, at weddings the young, single adults were allowed to eat first. Long tables were set up in a V shape, with the bride and groom sitting at the point of that V—or the Eck, as we called it. Then the rest of us divided out, the men sitting along the table on one side and the women on the other. Once seated, Anna and Tobias’s aunts and uncles served as the Ecktenders, bringing the food to us while the other married adults stood and looked on from the fringes, chatting among themselves.

  I sat beside Jake and proceeded to eat until I couldn’t fit another bite in my stomach. But that wasn’t the end of the celebration by any means. Once we were done eating, the adults took their turn eating as well, in shifts, and then finally the “going to the table” ritual began. Reserved for the younger, unmarried guests, it was a custom unique to our district and the part of the wedding day that those my age either dreaded or adored. The young single women filed out to wait in one of the larger upstairs bedrooms of Anna’s house while the young single men stayed in the barn, most standing around pretending they weren’t nervous as each one tried to get up the nerve to go to the room where the girls were waiting and ask one of them to “go to the table” with him. If the girl agreed, then the two of them would come downstairs together, sometimes holding hands, usually blushing, and make their way back to the tables in the barn, where this time the young men and women would sit together, rather than across from each other, and be served dessert and other special treats.

  Next to Sunday evening singings, going to the table was the best way to see how you might fare with the young Amish girl who had caught your eye. It could also be the worst way, as there was nothing more awful than working up the courage to ask a girl to go to the table and then have her giggle to her friends in response and tell you no. Or so I had heard.

  I hadn’t ever had to worry about it, as Rachel and I had always gone to the table together.

  “You are going to come upstairs and ask for me, aren’t you?” she had said under her breath a cold November day nearly six years ago when Ruth Suderman and Wayne Yoder got married. Rachel had just turned sixteen and was allowed to participate. We were passing each other at the beverage table during the noon meal.

  “You are going to say yes when I do, aren’t you?” I had whispered back with a grin.

  After the third or fourth wedding that year, Jake started complaining that I had it easy, that I had no idea what it was like to have to prove yourself worthy to someone you were dying to get to know.

  These days, Rachel didn’t really have to head upstairs with the other single girls because she had no need to find a suitable mate. She’d already found me, and I her, and it was a given that someday we would wed. But she went anyway to encourage her single friends, some of whom were from other districts.

  Now, once the young women were gone, I realized I couldn’t wait to go to the table with Rachel and have her all to myself. During the meal, I had been able to steal a few glances, but other than our brief exchange in the driveway much earlier, she and I had barely interacted all day.

  I was suddenly so eager to be with her, in fact, that I was the first to head out of the barn door, much to the laughter of my envious friends. When I reached the house, I went upstairs to get her, and then Rachel and I came back down together, hand in hand, and crossed back over to the barn. Though we were supposed to sit where designated, I led her to the far end of the table, nearest the door, so that when the singing started, we could still hear each other talk. We sat there together, holding hands under the table, watching and laughing as one by one the guys headed off and then returned, hopefully victorious, with the woman of his choice.

  Once everyone was seated—including the small group of girls who had not been asked or had said no to the asker—plates of candies, fruit, and little pieces of wedding cake were placed before us.

  “Nice wedding,” Rachel said, her dainty fingers reaching for a piece of fudge.

  I looked over at Anna and Tobias at the Eck, enjoying their own plates of sweets. “They look happy.”

  Rachel poked me in the shoulder. “That’s because they are.”

  I smiled at her, but my gaze was drawn back to Anna’s new spouse. Tobias had been born in Lancaster County and lived here his whole life. He’d gone through the usual period of rumspringa, eventually even taking a month off to go and explore the outside on his own. That took him as far as Myrtle Beach on the coast, and then he’d come back home to the family furniture business, bowed his head in baptism, joined the church, and now had married an Amish girl. I doubted he’d ever spent a moment wondering who he was or where he belonged.

  “Tyler.”

  I swung my head back around to face Rachel.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s bothering you?” Her kind face was sweetly marked with concern.

  “I ate too much,” I said, not wanting to mess with the festive mood around us.

  “Nice try. What’s up?”

  I shrugged, but her compassionate gaze wouldn’t allow me to say nothing at all. “Just thinking.”

  “About?”

  Fueled by excitement and chocolate, the noise level was beginning to rise. Soon the singing would start. It would be hard to have a deep conversation.

  “Just…life in general.” I toyed with a candied walnut on the plate. But then out of nowhere I voiced what was somersaulting around in my head. “Sometimes it seems that something out there is calling to me. Like maybe I have missed doing something I am supposed to take care of. And then I come to an event like this, and that feeling grows so strong, it’s nearly overwhelming.”

  I shut my mouth. I hadn’t wanted to say all of that aloud, especially not at that moment. Yet it had spilled out of me anyway.

  Pained uncertainty flickered across Rachel’s eyes. “Something out where is calling to you?”

  I shook my head. “We don’t need to talk about this now. I don’t know why I said anything.”

  Rachel sta
red at me, unwilling to drop it. “What is calling to you?”

  I squeezed her hand. “Forget I said anything.” Which was a dumb suggestion. She wasn’t going to forget.

  Besides, she knew me better than anyone. Better than Jake. Maybe even better than Daadi and Mammi.

  She also knew the timetable for when the next membership classes were to begin—and that I wasn’t sure yet if I was going to sign up for them. Membership preceded marriage. That’s how it had always been, which meant if I didn’t attend the next set of classes and take my vows of baptism and membership in the spring, I would not be able to marry her in the fall.

  “Is this about God? About your faith?”

  I shook my head. “No, of course not. I know what I believe. My faith is solid.”

  She nodded, quiet for a moment. “But this is about joining the church.” Her voice sounded sad, and for good reason. We both knew that if my faith was solid and yet I was still reluctant to join the church, then my hesitation was about things other than theology. Things like living the Amish lifestyle. Things like being married to her.

  “It’s about a lot of stuff,” I finally replied, though that wasn’t the whole truth. It was about the church. But it was also about me. And the world outside. And her, too, which I realized at that moment I didn’t want to add to the equation.

  “Stuff,” she echoed. “You mean things? Like the watch your father gave you? Your driver’s license?”

  My face grew warm. She was latching onto the few vestiges of the outside world I had yet to dispose of, but they had nothing to do with this. These days, except when I went out to visit my dad, the watch and the license remained tucked away in a drawer.

  “No, it’s not about things. It’s about all of this,” I said, gesturing toward the people and activities that surrounded us on every side. “It’s about figuring out where I belong.”