Growing Up Amish

by Ira Wagler

  Like the German hymns, the rest of Amish church services are slow and somber and measured throughout. And stiflingly boring for the kids.

  After several hymns, and after the preachers returned from their Obrote conference, the first preacher would stand and deliver a “short” sermon, as in twenty to forty-five minutes long.

  After the first sermon, we’d all kneel for prayer. Next, the deacon would stand and read a passage—usually a chapter—of Scripture.

  This would be followed by the main sermon, which was delivered by the second preacher. The main sermon could last from one to two hours. Needless to say, long-winded preachers are unanimously unpopular with the children, and probably with the adults, too. Not because of content, necessarily, but because it’s hard for children and adults alike to concentrate after three hours or more have passed.

  The sermons mostly consisted of a mixture of Scripture, gospel, and Amish rules. We heard from earliest memory the old Bible stories, spoken in intimate detail. From Adam, through Abraham and the patriarchs, all the way to the life of Jesus. And his death on the cross. It was all there, and it was all preached. And yet, somehow, the preachers all managed to weave the story into some strange brew of Amish context, the Amish rules and Ordnung. We were convinced, as children, that the Amish way was the only right way, the only true way. And that all those who were not Amish probably would not make it to heaven. Not that such a message was explicitly preached. But messages were preached in such a way that we could reach only that one stark conclusion. At least back then, that’s how it was.

  Aylmer had the normal contingent of three preachers: Peter Yoder, the bishop; Nicholas (Nicky) Stoltzfus; and Jacob (Jake) Eicher.

  Nicky Stoltzfus was my least favorite. A tall, gaunt man with a long, majestic beard that curled out at the tip, well below his chest, he had hollow eyes hidden under bushy brows. The real theologian of the three, he preached by far the deepest sermons.

  Barefoot he stood, preaching in a bone-dry voice.

  Paying little heed to the time.

  As a child napping with my head on my father’s lap, I often wished Nicky would just shut it down and sit down.

  I liked it much better when Jake Eicher preached. A fiery man with flat, straight-hanging hair and a bushy beard, Jake preached in a powerful, high-strung voice that invaded the last crevice in the remotest corner of the largest house. I’ve heard it said of Jake, perhaps unkindly, that he had one good sermon in him and we heard it many times. Probably true. But the man could keep the children awake and alert. He was my favorite, and the favorite of most children. We never napped when he rose to take the floor.

  After the main preacher finally wound down, there was another long prayer—more kneeling. And finally, one last song, which could go on for another agonizing ten minutes or so.

  Then—and only then—was church finally over.

  I don’t remember learning very much in church, mostly just wishing that it were over. Truth be told, the greatest lesson I ever learned in church actually came from my sisters.

  One Sunday morning when church was at Alva Eicher’s place, a family of strangers—probably relatives of somebody or other—had come in for the service. The father was really slick and cleaned up. Even his beard was trimmed. I heard later that they were from Nappanee, Indiana.

  As we tied up the horses and prepared to go into the house, I noticed a couple of young boys hovering close to the slicked-up man from Nappanee. One of the boys was about my age and inordinately rotund. I stared at him, fascinated. His body was almost as round as it was tall.

  All throughout the service, I watched this family, still marveling at this boy’s size. I’d never seen anyone so young quite so large. When church finally ended and the children were released, we all excitedly rushed out to play.

  Somewhere in the course of our play that afternoon, I approached the little boy. Round cheeked, he wore glasses perched on his pudgy nose. We stood there, sizing each other up. Hands in pants pockets. Awkwardly scuffing the dirt with our bare feet. At least, I was barefoot. He probably wore shoes, coming from Nappanee and all.

  We stood there, face-to-face. I was on my home turf. He was a stranger in a strange land. He smiled hesitantly.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Ernest,” he said shyly. He smiled again, almost pleadingly.

  Ernest. Never heard of a name like that before. I looked him up and down. Then into his eyes. “You are fat,” I said. Flatly. Matter-of-factly. Little rancor involved.

  His face fell. The smile vanished. His eyes widened with dismay and pain. He seemed to shrink into himself. Without a word, he turned and lumbered away.

  I walked off. Didn’t really think anything more about it. I didn’t despise him. Or laugh at him. He was just different. He was, well, fat.

  That afternoon, after we had returned home, my sisters talked of the strangers from Nappanee. And of the little boy. Ernest.

  “Did you play with him?” one of them asked. Probably Maggie. She was always admonishing us to be nice.

  “A little,” I answered innocently. “He was fat.”

  Maggie looked sharply at me, startled and suspicious.

  Utterly unaware of the effect my words would have, I blithely prattled on. “He was fat. I told him he was fat.” It was a huge mistake.

  My three sisters reacted with expressions of great horror and disbelief.

  “You did what?” they shrieked, practically in unison. And right there, on the spot, an impromptu school session was called to order.

  Three screeching teachers. One poor, unwilling little four-year-old student.

  The tumultuous clamor of their voices echoed through the house in loud, overwhelming waves. I wished they would stop before they woke Dad from his nap. That wouldn’t be good for anyone. I stood there, perplexed. I honestly wasn’t sure what all the fuss was about.

  “You can’t do that, make fun of someone because of how he looks,” Naomi lectured sternly. “It’s not kind.”

  Kind? What did that have to do with anything? Truth was truth. Unwilling to concede without making a defense, I bristled.

  “But he was fat,” I said stoutly.

  Alas, my rock-solid reasoning was promptly smashed and swept aside like so much dust. My retort triggered a cascade of even more anguished screeching. Many ominous scenarios were trotted out. What if people made fun of the way you look? laughed at your curly hair? How would you like that?

  Although failing to see any connection between my hair and my apparently unforgivable sin, I nonetheless made a hasty tactical decision to not say anything more.

  Shut up and retreat.

  The screeching eventually subsided. Soundly admonished and feeling very chastised, I was released at last. Relieved, I dashed off to play.

  My sisters’ lecturing must have sunk in somewhat. I’m sure I committed countless childish transgressions in the ensuing years. But none even remotely approached the level of my stark, pure cruelty to a poor, overweight boy named Ernest on a long-ago summer Sunday afternoon in Aylmer.

  5

  I wanted to go.

  I yearned to go.

  But I was too little, they said. And too young.

  “Wait a few years. Your time will come soon enough.”

  And so, I watched my brothers leave, one at a time.

  Each morning they walked out of the house, swinging their lunch pails beside them. They returned each afternoon around three thirty and told me about their day—all the things they had seen and learned. And of the books they’d read.

  “When you turn six,” my mother told me. “Then you can go.”

  Days passed.

  Then weeks.

  Then months.

  And then one August, the big day arrived—my sixth birthday. Now I was old enough. And big enough. Finally, I could go to school.

  I’ll never forget my first day. I left the house with my brothers and trudged importantly down the road, clutching my penci
ls and a ruler. Swinging my new blue-green lunch box, I strode bravely up the cracked and ancient concrete walkway and up the steps into the big white schoolhouse.

  Many of my classmates had already arrived and were milling about. Harold Stoll. Jerry Eicher. Willis Stoll. Abraham Marner. Lydia Wagler (my first cousin). And Lois Gascho.

  We stood around, wide eyed in awe. A few looked as if they might cry. The second and third graders marched about, casting condescending glances at the little first-grade rookies.

  I both liked and feared our teacher, Miss Eicher. Like most teachers, she had her favorites. I wasn’t one of them.

  I did have some small advantages, though. I knew my ABCs. I’d learned them at home from my older siblings. I could already read a bit from the tattered remnants of Dick and Jane books we had at home. And I could count in blocks of ten.

  I quickly fell into the routine at school.

  We learned to print the letters of the alphabet on rough paper in uneven, heavily pressed pencil lines. We learned to count and write numbers, and to add and subtract. And we learned to speak English. That was the rule. Only English at school. No Pennsylvania Dutch. After a few months, we were all moderately fluent in the language.

  On the whole, I really liked school, although I could never admit it.

  Girls liked school.

  Boys weren’t supposed to.

  When asked by an adult, I scoffed and claimed I didn’t. But I did.

  The first year passed, and before long, I was one of the second graders. Now I could strut about with my classmates and look pityingly on the poor, confused little first graders, huddled in groups looking as if they might cry.

  Miss Eicher was my second-grade teacher too. And no, I still wasn’t one of her favorites.

  I loved books and spent hours absorbing great chunks of words, to the detriment of my other studies. During that year, my class learned penmanship, writing in script. I hated it passionately. Our usual lesson consisted of writing sentences—usually about ten or twenty—from our lesson book. When we were done, Miss Eicher allowed us to go outside and play, even though it wasn’t recess.

  My friends Jerry and Harold zipped through their writing exercises, scrawling their sentences in mere minutes before rushing outside, while I sat at my desk, laboring mightily to finish my writing so I could join them. It took me forever.

  Eventually, my frustration got the best of me. One fateful day, I scrawled a few illegible lines across the barren expanse of notebook paper and rushed outside to join my classmates. Miss Eicher usually didn’t check our writing assignments anyway.

  In our next writing class, I did it again. And again, in the writing class after that. And again and again.

  I got away with it for weeks. It was my little secret.

  But the day of reckoning approached.

  Then it arrived.

  I was heading in from outside after the first bell rang when I heard someone call my name. Miss Eicher wanted to see me at my desk. Right now.

  A tremor of fear sliced through me.

  I walked inside with a sinking heart. Miss Eicher was sitting at my desk, looking down at my writing notebook, a crowd of my classmates clustered around her. A low murmur drifted through the group. I caught snatches, whispers. “A-a-ah.” “O-o-oh.” “Didn’t do his writing.” “Just made scribbles.” “Teacher just caught it. . . .”

  As I walked the gauntlet, my classmates lined the aisle, staring with wide accusing eyes and jostling for a better view of the imminent inquisition. I sensed no pity in them. Only morbid fascination.

  I approached my desk, feet dragging, and stood with a hanging head before my judge. She looked at me sternly.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” she demanded, motioning to the notebook spread open on my desk. The damning scribbles seemed to leap from the pages, screaming accusations at me before all the world.

  I stood mute and wide eyed. I’d get a whipping now for sure. Miss Eicher had her established methods for dealing with miscreants. The prisoner would be escorted outside to the woodshed and left there to ponder his or her fate while Miss Eicher came back into the classroom, slid open a desk drawer, pulled out a sturdy wooden ruler, and marched back to the woodshed, where swift and severe punishment would be administered.

  I had seen it. I had heard it. It had happened to my friends. Now my time had come, I knew. I swallowed, my brown eyes brimming with tears. But I didn’t cry.

  I feared Mom would find out. Oh, the shame. And Dad. Another whipping would follow at home. The seconds crawled by. Miss Eicher did not soften her stern, unrelenting gaze.

  Abruptly, she instructed my classmates to fetch their writing books so she could check their work. Jerry and Harold, the two swiftest writers, scrambled piously to comply. They gleefully showed her all their finished lessons. They cast scornful glances at me. They wouldn’t dream of doing what I had done.

  I stood hunched and silent, guilty before them all.

  Then Miss Eicher abruptly got up, rang the second bell, and afternoon classes resumed.

  That was it.

  She did not spank me, or even tell my parents (as far as I knew). But she did make me stay inside at recess and during lunch hour and finish every single abominable writing exercise I had avoided.

  It took several days.

  After I had laboriously completed the last dreadful assignment, she released me to join my classmates, and I ran outside gratefully.

  It was never mentioned again.

  Nor was it forgotten.

  While I might have struggled with the tediousness of writing drills, it was the bigger questions in life that really held my attention—even at such a young age.

  Twice a month, on Friday afternoons, we had art class, which consisted of the students’ drawing simple things like birds and a sun with cascading beams in the upper corner and short slogans like “God Is Love” or “Love” at the bottom.

  One day at recess my friends Willis, Jerry, and Philip and I stood examining the art displayed on the wall and trying to guess who drew what. One drawing had the usual “Love” slogan at the bottom.

  We stood there with our hands in our barn-door pants pockets, or with thumbs hooked on our galluses—as we’d seen our fathers do at church—and discussed whether we really should love everyone. Even our enemies.

  We agreed we should.

  “But what about Satan?” Philip asked. “Should we love him, too?”

  We respected Philip. He was a year older and a grade above us. Next year he would graduate to the west school where the big students went.

  It was a startling thought. We grappled with the disturbing concept. Satan was wicked; that we knew from countless sermons. He’d tempted Eve in the Garden and even now lurked about trying to get little children to do bad things.

  But weren’t we supposed to love everyone? Even him? We could not imagine that we should hate anything or anyone.

  “Satan is bad. We shouldn’t love him,” I said tentatively. But I was unsure of my words.

  In the next few minutes, the four of us hashed it out with serious observations and solemn comments, balancing the sin of loving evil against the sin of not loving at all.

  We finally reached a consensus and agreed that perhaps we were obligated to love Satan just a little bit. Not much. Just enough so we wouldn’t hate him, because hating was wrong.

  Satisfied, we disbanded as the bell rang and returned to our desks.

  We told no one of our conclusion. But I pondered the issue in my heart for months.

  6

  Soon after school began came the first frosts of fall.

  As autumn descended on the farm, row upon row of whispering green cornstalks faded slowly to a greenish brown. Neighbors gathered and helped one another as teams and wagons plodded through the fields and returned laden with long, heavy bundles of cornstalks flowing over the sides and dragging on the ground.

  The corn bundles were then thrown into the ravenous chopper, where they
were shredded to bits before being propelled up the long pipes into the silo until it was bulging to the brim. The air reeked with the wet, pungent odor of fresh chopped cornstalks.

  And every year Mom warned us all with terrifying tales of the awful things that could happen if one didn’t respect the chopper and got too close.

  My personal favorite was the classic tale of the little four-year-old boy from somewhere, sometime, who disappeared one fall without a trace. Right at silo-filling time, of course. He had wandered too close and fallen in when they were filling the silo and the chopper had devoured him. Nothing was seen of him again until the next winter, when they were throwing down silage to feed the cows. They found his chopped-up remains, in tiny bits, mixed in with the silage. We listened, wide eyed and appalled. I don’t know if the story was actually true.

  We all watched ourselves around the chopper nevertheless. No sense becoming a cautionary tale for future generations.

  * * *

  In the fall of 1970, I entered the fourth grade at the west school, where the big children went. I looked forward to joining the upper grades and proudly trudged off with my brother Titus. From the first day, things did not go so well.

  Back at the east school, I was a big fish in a little pond. A tough third grader—a leader. But in fourth grade I was a tiny tadpole in a vast ocean. A nobody. A scrawny little kid to be kicked around.

  And kicked around I was. But I deserved it. I didn’t know my place. My big mouth was part of the problem. That, and my stubborn nature, which I had inherited from my father.