The Homestead

by Linda Byler

  “Why is that, Hannah?”

  “They’re stupid. Pecking and flogging, mishting all over everything.”

  Elam and Ben threw back their heads simultaneously, howling with laughter. “You have to agree, Dat,” they chortled.

  Her father laughed along with the boys, then told Hannah if that was the case, they’d try and keep her out of the henhouse, which evoked a reluctant smile from her. And so it went.

  Every day was a rediscovery of joy, renewing old acquaintances, working on the home place, doing for Dat and the boys. Her sisters were regular visitors, flocking into the yard like garrulous birds, dressed in greens and purples and blues.

  But Hannah constantly chafed at the restraints that held her. She felt suffocated by the towering trees, the still and stifling air, the barn hovering over the house, rearing its head like an overprotective guard. Sometimes she felt as if she should lean all her weight against it, move it away. It was built too close to the house, in her opinion.

  The smell of manure clung to everything. It was spread on the fields with a rattling contraption drawn by horses. It clung to the cows’ tails and there were piles of it in the barnyard. It permeated every denim coat and pair of rubber boots that stood on the woven rug inside the door.

  Thunderstorms and rain showers were frequent, loading down the unmoving air with dense humidity that drew sweat until it ran down her face. Her dress back was soaked with it as she bent over picking lima beans and string beans, tomatoes and cucumbers.

  The only bright spot in her restricted, clamped-down world was her unmarried uncles, Ben and Elam. Hannah made them laugh. She was always surprising them. Girls her age did not talk the way she did. She viewed the world through thorny glasses, unafraid to voice an opinion, no matter how colorful or prickly.

  The aunts supplied the Swiss organdy fabric for a new white cape and apron and a new covering so she could attend church services. New shoes and dresses materialized for all the girls so they could be seen as decent, hiding any signs of the poverty in which they had lived.

  Hannah forgot how itchy that stiff Swiss organdy was. She grumbled and complained; she couldn’t get the pins in straight, her hair wasn’t rolled right, and her bob on the back of her head was too loose. “I don’t know why we have to roll our hair along the side of our heads. Whoever invented that was just plain ignorant.”

  Sarah peered around Mary, who stood in front of her mother. She was pinning the white organdy apron around Mary’s narrow waist, looking pretty herself in a purple dress with a black cape and apron pinned perfectly.

  That was the thing about being Amish, Hannah thought. There were so many ways of being neat and just as many of being sloppy. The leblein sewn on the back of each dress—the small piece of fabric sewn to the waistline—was where the sides of the apron had to be pinned to with precision, so it would hang straight and even on each side.

  Same way with the pleats pinned on the shoulder of the cape: perfectly aligned down the back, the neckline in front not too low (that projected hochmut, or “loose morals”) or too high and certainly not crooked.

  The hemline of the apron should be aligned with the hemline of the dress, the double row of deep pleats in the back, below the leblein as straight as a pole. It was all about neatness, modesty, precision, and if it came right down to it, perhaps a tinge of fashion as well.

  The fancy girls’ head coverings were smaller, their hair combed in loose waves. Dresses could be shorter or belts on aprons wider. Anything tight or form-fitting was considered risqué, but some girls tried to get away with it, creeping out of the side or back doors before their fathers caught sight of them.

  So Hannah went to church services for the first time in many months, in a district that was not her own (they had lived close to the town of Intercourse), in a foul mood, dissatisfied with her appearance, without knowing a single person.

  She rode with Elam, Ben, and Manny. Twenty-one-year-old Elam and twenty-year-old Ben were dark-haired, dark-eyed young men. Good-humored and easygoing, they enjoyed life on the farm, their social activities, horses, and girls. Both of them could have had almost anyone they chose from the flock of young ladies they hauled to and from hymn singings and Saturday night barn parties called hoedowns.

  Elam, especially, at the age of twenty-one, was considered quite a ketch, the girls clamoring for his attention in their covert glances and witty remarks.

  None of the youth drove a buggy with a top on it, as was the custom at the time of the Great Depression. They only bought a doch-veggly, literally translated as a roof wagon, after they married, if they could afford one. If not, they continued traveling in the courting buggy, a one-seated buggy with a lidded box in the back, a rubber blanket to pull up over the people seated on the lone seat fastened to a hook with a leather strap. A sturdy black umbrella was poked down along the side, where it was within easy reach, in case of rain or snow.

  When there were three or four individuals to take, the driver merely plopped himself on someone’s lap, and they rode in layers.

  This morning, Hannah and Manny were seated, with Elam and Ben perched comfortably on their laps. It was a fine morning, already uncomfortably warm, the sun an orange ball of heat, the air moist with humidity.

  The horse was black with four white feet, a long blaze of white down the length of his face, his neck arched like a show horse, his small curved ears turned forward. There were white porcelain rings on the harness, which were there only for show, although usually the young boys would try to pass it off as a necessity. The buggy was gleaming after its wash with buckets of soapy water, the spokes of the wheels throwing off sparkles in the sunlight.

  “You may as well own a car,” Hannah blurted out.

  “What?” Elam was incredulous.

  “Why do you say that?” Ben asked, pretending innocence.

  “Your horse and buggy is all about hochmut. You can’t tell me you don’t have loads of pride in this horse. I bet it’s the fanciest horse in Lancaster.”

  “God made this horse. We are not out of the Ordnung,” said Elam, testily defending himself. He did have pride, but to be told it to his face was a different thing entirely.

  “God doesn’t make cars. Men do,” Ben agreed.

  “Puh. Men can’t do a thing unless God gives them the knowledge. We’re supposed to have cars or God wouldn’t allow it.”

  “Perhaps their knowledge is of the devil.”

  “Oh, now you sound like Dat.”

  “Hannah, your father is in his grave, may he rest in peace. You should not be talking like this.”

  “I don’t care what you say. You still sound like him. I can’t stand the way Amish people speak about anything they reject. Just because they can’t have it doesn’t make it wrong for everybody else.”

  Elam and Ben both shrugged, held their peace. She spoke the truth, and they knew it. Each man’s conscience had to account for himself and not another person, especially those who were ausriche.

  Unapologetic, Hannah rode to church, figuring those two needed to get off the tower of their own goodness, get back down, and live like the rest of the world. Life pinched your backside sometimes. It sure did.

  Here she was, then, pushed into this strange room with a gaggle of girls dressed in a colorful display of Sunday finery, the white capes and aprons like a mist of purity. They were all shapes and sizes, dark-haired, blonde, some with facial pimples, others with clear skin, large noses, small perfect ones, bad teeth, and beautiful smiles.

  Hannah shook hands, a twisted half-smile of self-consciousness plastered on her stiff features. Her hair was rolled too loosely, resulting in shtrubles, loose hair that floated free, the first mark of a sloppy, ill-kempt girl. Her cape was pinned wrong too, the pleats down the back crooked, one sticking out the side, the other plunging straight down the opposite shoulder. Her stockings were too heavy. Who would have made her wear those hideous stockings? the observant girls wondered.

  Some of them knew who she w
as, had heard of Mose and Sarah Detweiler and their ill-timed voyage to the West.

  The room quieted as they examined this tall, dark-haired girl with the unfriendly expression, the too-dark eyes that threw their own glances back at them making them uncomfortable. The silence became strained; a few ill-timed and out-of-place giggles erupted. No one welcomed her. Most of them were simply at a loss in the face of Hannah’s belligerence, if you could call it that.

  Everyone was relieved when the lady of the house came to tell them it was time to be seated. They filed in after her. The girls were accustomed to being seated strictly by their age, but no one was brave enough to ask Hannah how old she was.

  Hannah stood watching as one by one they formed a line and walked out the door on their way to the barn. A small girl who looked no older than twelve called out, “Wait!” She pointed to Hannah. A heavy-set girl, her wide face friendly, stepped back and motioned Hannah forward with a wave of her hand.

  She fell into line then, wondering if it was all right for a sixteen year old to be seated with the school-aged ones. Nothing to do for it now. A deep dislike for the girls her own age, for Lancaster County, for tradition, and for everything about this day, this church, and her own life settled about her shoulders like the ill-fitting white cape she wore.

  She wanted her own Sunday on the prairie back in North Dakota, where she was free to roam, to ride horses, and to watch the calves; to contemplate the grass blowing every which way by wind that smelled of clean, dark earth and dried plants; to reflect on gophers and prairie hens and wet mud and trickling water in the creek bottom, where dragonflies perched on weeds and the breeze rustled the cottonwood leaves like a song; and thinking, most of all, that Clay Jenkins might ride over, which he sometimes did.

  Hannah missed him with an acute sense of absence that was always brought back to earth by their impossible situation. Sometimes, she wondered to herself if his love would be deep enough that he would become Amish, follow her culture, and submit to the Ordnung’s ways. And quickly she knew he wouldn’t.

  To imagine Clay perched on a courting buggy, driving along the well-kept roads of Lancaster County, the thick green corn growing like a forest on either side; a life of order, hard work, and restrictions was a joke, and she knew it with a sense of hopelessness.

  He was as free and unfettered as the wind, his life revolving around a wide space of choices without demands. A whole other lifestyle. A heap of old boards and tin and automobile parts, wheels and unkempt weeds around the barn, broken fences patched with barbed wire and dry boards the cows would easily break through again—none of it mattered to the Jenkinses. If the fence wasn’t repaired immediately, it posed no real problem. The cows and calves that broke through would be rounded up sometime, and, if not, the Jenkins men enjoyed chasing and roping them on horseback.

  This glaring difference was like a slap of reality, sitting on the hard bench, a head taller than any of the girls around her. It was bad enough being so tall without having to be seated in a row of much younger girls.

  Well, she knew one thing: she was going back.

  CHAPTER 17

  The remainder of the church service passed in a haze of remembering. The need to get away from this stifling, bustling colony of relatives and friends she was sort of acquainted with consumed Hannah. Perhaps she could manage to act like everyone else—friendly, bland, saying just the right thing at just the right moment—enough so that everyone would approve of the widow Detweiler’s oldest daughter.

  What a nice young woman, they’d say.

  What was nice? By whose measure were you nice? Which words and actions came under nice? It was a high ceiling to measure up to, that was sure. The whole world of being proper, well brought up, soft spoken, and sweet, was a world in which she simply wasn’t interested. She wanted to live a life that was real—to herself and her own dreams and expectations, not someone else’s.

  Her mother, though. That was the one bond she could hardly bring herself to break. To tell her outright that she was not staying here but returning to North Dakota was almost more than she could think about. Sarah wouldn’t agree, but to keep Hannah, Sarah might offer to follow her back to the homestead, like the willing servant she was.

  Hannah didn’t help sing. The swells of the German plainsong around her brought an unexpected lump in her throat, a surprising and unwanted emotion. After services, she slouched in a corner of the room, without taking part in the conversation, her glowering expression keeping everyone at bay.

  No one spoke to her while she sat at the table to eat the schnitz boy, jam, and bread and butter, pickles and sour red beets, so she didn’t bother waiting on tables or helping with the dishes.

  Visibly relieved when Manny came to ask her if she was ready to go, she rode away from the church service with pleasure.

  Elam asked if she wanted to go along to the hymn singing that evening.

  “No!” Hannah shouted.

  “Whoa,” Ben laughed.

  “I don’t know anyone, no one talks to me, so why would I?”

  “The West has changed you, Hannah.”

  “You didn’t know me before I left, so how would you know?” Hannah was bristling with enough anger to repel any advances on her good humor, unknowingly separating herself from anyone in the courting buggy.

  “Yeah, maybe so,” Elam replied quietly, leaving a silence to settle around the open-seated buggy the remainder of the ride home.

  Hannah locked herself in the guest room and wrote a letter to the Jenkinses, not just to Clay. No use him getting all kinds of ideas about her missing him, which she didn’t.

  “Dear folks …”

  That didn’t sound right so she erased “folks” and wrote “friends.” Better. In North Dakota your folks were your family, and there was no sense in letting Clay think she was part of the family, which she wasn’t.

  “How are you?” Should she include “all”? If she wrote, “How are you all,” they might think she was trying to write or speak the way they did, with their y’alls and their fers.

  She erased the whole question.

  “We’re here in Lancaster County at my mother’s home place. The barn is much too close to the house, everyone knows everyone else’s business, and the relatives are like a large gaggle of geese. They all look the same, except some are older than others.”

  Here she paused, wondering if she should tell Clay about her plans. Perhaps she shouldn’t, since the plans for how she expected to go about it weren’t solid yet. But they would be. She just couldn’t be sure how she planned to go about it.

  “The corn here in Pennsylvania looks like a never-ending forest of upright stalks with huge yellow ears. It rains regularly. If North Dakota had some way of watering the fields, my father’s idea might have worked. But you can’t grow corn without water. Doesn’t rain out there.

  “I can’t ride horses here. My grandfather would be shocked. Girls just put on their neat dresses and capes and aprons and ride around in dumb buggies and say exactly the right thing in the right tone of voice, which I suppose I’ll have to learn.” (Let Clay think she was not coming back. That would be good for him.)

  Midway through her letter writing, there was a firm knock on the door, followed by, “Hannah!”

  “What?”

  “Go along to the singin’. You know Rebecca Lapp.”

  “Is she there?”

  “Usually.”

  “I don’t have anything to wear.”

  “Yes, you do. What’s wrong with what you wore to church?”

  Silence.

  “Come on, Hannah. You have an hour to get ready.”

  “Who else is going?”

  “Open the door.”

  Hannah slipped the paper and pencil into a drawer, then unlocked the door, peering around it to find Ben in the dim light of the long hallway.

  “What?”

  “I think you should try being part of our group. Give rumschpringa a fair chance. Come on. You shouldn�
�t lock yourself away from the world we live in. You can’t go back, not for your mother’s sake, Hannah.”

  “No one talks to me.”

  “Not with that expression on your face.”

  “What expression?”

  “You know. Mad. You’re plain mad.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Come on. I’m leaving at seven. Get ready.”

  With that, he left, but Hannah could tell he genuinely wanted her company, which was something, wasn’t it? But still …

  Torn, Hannah wallowed in indecision. It would be so much easier to return to the West if she could alienate herself successfully. Why try and enter the world of rumschpringa? What was in it for her? She didn’t need the company of other young girls, did she? They talked about stupid things that held absolutely no interest for her. They giggled and laughed and simpered about things she didn’t think were one bit funny. They were just plain dumb.

  She didn’t like the way they all had the same goal. Getting married. Finding a suitable young man and getting married. It was considered the highest honor, the ultimate destination.

  Hannah couldn’t understand that very well. She wanted to get back to the homestead, learn to rope and ride, install a windmill and a tank, run the best herd of cows for miles around. Her and Manny.

  It was all right, this bit of excitement with Clay. He was someone to talk to and admire. But what she wanted from him was certainly not marriage. She wanted his experience, his knowledge of the West, the cows, all of it. This kissing thing wasn’t anything. She had no plans of falling in love, which was a term that hung on the edges of idiocy.

  What all that love thing entailed, she had no idea. She wasn’t about to be trapped, like a groundhog in the steel-toothed jaws of a rusty old trap like Manny used to set on the edge of the cornfields. Anyone who was smart could plainly see what marriage brought. Look at Mam. She had no life. She gave her life to her husband, and to God, and look where she landed. No, this thing of giving your whole life and will to a man—incompetent creatures, half of them—was for the birds.