Growing Up Amish

by Ira Wagler

  About a month before the actual wedding, at the close of a regular church service, the bishop formally announces the upcoming event. “A brother and sister have expressed their desire to get married.” He names the couple and announces the wedding date, and during those few short weeks leading up to the grand event, the couple bask in the good wishes of friends and neighbors.

  I had asked Sarah to marry me. And in the days that followed, we talked about a distant date. Next year, maybe next summer. That would give me some time. Time to adjust to the idea, time to prepare myself mentally. Time to force myself to go through with it, as I had done a few years before when my baptismal date loomed. I had every intention of going through with it. Maybe not right then, but soon. When the day came, I would be ready. Of that I was fully confident.

  27

  It arrived innocently enough, the dark thing. One day, as I was preparing to go somewhere in my buggy, probably to church, I harnessed my faithful stallion and hitched him up. I soon realized something was seriously wrong with my horse. His head hung low, and he did not snort or paw about as usual. After we returned home later that day, I led him to his stall and wiped him down. Brought him some good hay and feed. Petted him and soothed him. He nibbled listlessly at his food.

  Maybe he had a cold or something. He’d surely get better soon. In the following days I kept an eye on him, led him out each day for water and a bit of exercise. Spoke to him soothingly. But he did not improve, and as the days passed, I became increasingly alarmed. Just once, I hitched him to a light two-wheeled cart and drove him up to Chuck’s Café. He seemed to have lost his sense of balance and staggered alarmingly. After we made it home, I led him back to his stall. It was time to call the vet.

  But even then, I hedged. I could not and would not bring myself to make that call. Time heals, I figured. Just give the Stud some time. He’d be himself soon enough.

  He wasn’t, of course. The days passed. Then the weeks. His health did not improve. Instead, he became increasingly listless and lifeless. And the day arrived when he could no longer stand when I walked into his stall to feed him. He lay there, on his side, his eyes dull and glazed, his breath coming in slow, rasping gasps.

  Now it was time to call the vet. I should have done it long before. I rode up to Chuck’s Café after lunch that day. The crowd there greeted me boisterously, as usual, but I did not respond. Every person there got somber and quiet. My horse was sick, I told them. I needed to call the vet. Mrs. C waved me to her wall phone and I dialed the number. It just so happened he was in my general area, his secretary told me.

  He arrived early that afternoon, a young guy from Centerville. The Stud was still on his side in his stall, unable to even get up on his feet. The vet examined him. Poked and prodded him here and there. Pried open his mouth, stared down his throat. And then the vet stood and turned to me somberly.

  “He’s done. Your horse is not going to get better,” he told me. “There’s nothing I can do. We may as well put him down.”

  I stared at him. I heard the words. He spoke what I had feared would come. And now I’d have to decide. I looked at the Stud, my proud horse, helpless on his side, breathing hard. It could not be. Of all the bad luck I could imagine, this was probably the worst. Something I could not have fathomed or foreseen.

  I could just let my horse die on his own, I thought. A natural passing. But as I looked down at his proud head, now sweating with fever, I knew I could not do that. He was as good as gone. There was no sense in prolonging his agony. I turned to the vet.

  “Just give me a minute,” I said. He nodded, turned, and walked out of the barn.

  I knelt there in the dust and straw beside my horse, cradled his fevered head in my arms, and stroked his long, coarse black hair for the last time. I spoke no words, just knelt there in silence and sorrow. Minutes passed. The vet waited patiently outside. I stood, then bent and stroked the Stud’s forehead one more time. Then I turned and walked out.

  “Do what you have to do,” I said to the vet.

  He walked into the barn carrying an ominous little black satchel. I crouched inside the doorway of the barn, watching. He set down his satchel and opened it, took out a large syringe fitted with a wicked-looking needle, and a plastic bottle filled with clear liquid. He stabbed the needle into the bottle and filled the syringe. Then he stepped over to my horse, wiped a spot on his neck, lifted the syringe, and plunged the long needle into the hard muscles in the Stud’s neck. Slowly he depressed the plunger, and the evil liquid flowed into the Stud’s veins.

  In mere seconds the Stud’s entire body relaxed visibly. He never even quivered. Just relaxed. Then his proud eyes closed in final sleep. It was over. My horse was dead. His body lay there, stretched in the dust and straw, limp and quiet.

  I got up and walked outside.

  After the vet had cleaned up and left, I hitched a team to our work cart, backed up to the barn door, uncoiled a long rope attached to the cart, and tied it to the Stud’s rear hooves. I clucked to my team, and the horses snorted nervously at the smell of dead flesh behind them before lunging forward. Then off we went up the hill to the west side of the house, and down again on the other side, to a soft, shaded spot beside a tree-lined creek in the northern field.

  After untying the rope from the Stud’s hooves, I drove back to the barnyard, gathered a massive hedge-wood corner post, a posthole digger, and a chain saw, and returned to the spot where the Stud’s body lay.

  The soil by the creek was moist and soft, and within a couple of hours, I had dug the hole. A grave for my horse. I shoveled the damp earth over him and piled it high.

  Dusk was settling around me as I sank the post into the ground and tamped the dirt around it. I fired up the chain saw and cut the Stud’s date of death into the post. Then I fastened his halter and his lead rope around the post. And with that, it was finished.

  I stood there, a solitary figure in the lengthening shadows. The sun sank low, then disappeared. In the settling night, bats flitted and zipped about. In the southern skies, a white half moon appeared, then the first stars. From the brushy hillsides all around, whip-poor-wills whooped and called. I stood there, silent, unmoving for some time. Finally, I stirred, picked up my gear and turned toward home. I slept that night in utter exhaustion—a deep, dreamless slumber.

  My horse was dead. He’d passed, after wilting into a weak and helpless shell, for no discernible reason. And was now properly buried, by my own hand. A signal event, unexpected and tragic, followed by a symbolic act. In my exhausted and traumatized mind, it seemed like a sign. There was nothing left to keep me here. Not even my horse.

  * * *

  Those around me sensed and felt my despair, but they seemed helpless to offer any comfort or assistance. There was no rage. No lashing out at anyone, no seething. I don’t remember the exact moment that I realized I could not do it. A few months later, I suppose. Or maybe I always knew it, deep down, but could not face it honestly. Whatever the case, I fully and finally realized and admitted to myself that if I married Sarah, I would one day leave her. Period.

  My final withdrawal from her was painful and protracted. Instead of confronting my options and making decisions, I continued mentally drifting away from her. She sensed she was losing me for real this time and fought hard to hold me. Still, I avoided the matter as much as possible because I didn’t want to hurt her. What I didn’t realize was that my actions and eventual choices would hurt her far worse than they would have, had I just told her how it was.

  Looking back, there really was no reason why it couldn’t have worked, at least on the surface of things. We were very compatible, she and I. She loved me honestly and deeply. She would have been intensely loyal. But in my heart, I felt nothing. No love. No feelings at all. Except a sense of pity for the pain I knew was coming. For what I would put her through.

  During the years of our courtship, we got to know each other pretty well, up to a point. Beyond that, I would not allow her closer, would no
t allow her to explore the boundaries of my heart. Had I known then even a fraction of what I now know, the issues would have been confronted. I would have spoken, confided in someone. But there was no one—not one soul—I trusted enough to reveal what was in my heart. That’s just the way it was.

  And there was one other thing Sarah and I never did together. An important thing for any couple considering marriage, according to our preachers in the Amish church.

  We never prayed together. Never approached God to ask for his blessing on our future. Never. We should have, I suppose. But we didn’t. And the blame for that omission was mine alone. I was the man. In Amish culture, as in many others, the man is expected to lead. Physically. Emotionally. Spiritually.

  I did not. Didn’t have the nerve, I guess. And besides, I wasn’t sure it would do any good. There were times when I wasn’t even sure I believed in God at all.

  I probably always believed there was a God, a sort of dark and frowning force. I just didn’t believe in him, not to the extent that I thought he could or would make an actual difference in my life. I tried to believe, in my heart. But I couldn’t, in my head. I’d heard about him all my life. But if he was everything the preachers claimed he was, he sure had a strange way of hiding himself from people like me.

  And because we, Sarah and I, could not address the God we claimed to serve, because we could not as a couple even speak to him from our hearts, our relationship was doomed to fail.

  Sometime late in 1985, I entered a land of looming, fearful shadows, a mental zombie zone, from which I would not emerge for several years. And gradually, I descended into a world of real depression. There was no diagnosis, because counseling was not an option. Requesting counseling, back then, would have been tantamount to admitting one was insane. Not that I would ever have thought of considering it, anyway. I wouldn’t have known enough to consider it. So there was no help for me. The darkness would have to be faced alone.

  Those were surreal days, in retrospect. I walked about in a fog of pain and silence, walled off from those around me. I wasn’t angry. Only sad. And not particularly because of them. It was not their fault. They were who they were. And I was who I was. They could not communicate. I could not communicate. We didn’t know how. We were never taught how. So we stirred about, passing each other like blind men stumbling in the night.

  Had I been less intense or less honest, I might have squelched the doubts, ignored the depression, as most Amish youth somehow manage to squelch that inner drive, the inner hunger to know and live outside the box of Amish life. Some few probably never even wonder what’s outside or, if so, only sporadically, lacking any real passion to find out. Some have vague perceptions that there is another world out there. Most decide to do what needs to be done, and they stick with it through sheer force of will.

  But for me, that was impossible. I was trapped. The walls were closing in. Imminent disaster loomed. Those around me simply looked on in disbelief as I slowly sank before their eyes. In their defense, they offered what they could, which was little more than the broad, meaningless bromides I had heard all my life: “Can’t you just decide to do what’s right? Reject the ‘world’ and accept the Amish way? Really and truly, once and for all?”

  In the troubled fog of those days, Mom sought me out one day and tearfully spoke to me of Jesus and how he could help me, if only I asked him. Her words came from her heart, and she believed them. And I did not doubt them, necessarily. But what she said was hopeless. At least to me. I had tried that a few times. Praying. Never seemed to do much good. Maybe my prayers weren’t heard. I doubted that they were. I’d done a lot of bad stuff, possibly even committed the unpardonable sin. Blasphemed the Holy Spirit, that horrendous act about which Amish preachers often thundered at great length and warned against. None had ever, as far as I could remember, defined that unpardonable sin. What it meant to blaspheme the Spirit. But it probably applied to me and the things I’d done. Who could tell?

  I turned from Mom in silence. She did not approach me again, not like that.

  My father, too, troubled by my traumatized state, admonished me kindly, or with what passed as kindness for him. The Stud’s death, he decided, was the real source of my problems. The reason I was depressed. A horse is a horse, he told me encouragingly. There were other horses out there, as good as or better than the Stud had been. He even offered to buy me another one, any horse I chose. It was a generous, although somewhat desperate, gesture, coming from a tough old man like him.

  But from him, too, I turned in gloom and silence. And he did not approach me again, not like that.

  The days crept by. I still faced one major task, an ominous task, fraught with all manner of messiness—breaking up with Sarah. It loomed before me like the dark clouds of a gathering thunderstorm. Never for one instant did I consider slipping away. I would face her and tell her this hard and terrible thing. That I did not love her and that I was leaving. It was almost more than my exhausted mind could absorb, but I never considered any other option. The days of leaving with only a note to explain my absence were over. I would never do that again. Not to my parents. Not to anyone. Ever.

  I would face Sarah and tell her. But when? How? There was never a good time for a tough job like this, but if it had to be done, I might as well get it over with.

  With the Stud gone, I drove Kenny, a sad old plug of a horse, to church and the singing. Kenny was almost a caricature compared with the Stud. Big headed. Bony. Klutzy. No one in my position would normally be caught—under any circumstances—driving a horse like that, but I couldn’t have cared less. Little pride remained in me for the trappings of Amish youth. And Kenny did get me to where I was going, albeit at his own snail’s pace.

  I don’t remember where the singing was that Sunday night. After the singing, I hitched up Kenny, and we lurched slowly up to where the girls waited for their rides. Sarah flitted from the group and stepped up into my buggy. As I had done dozens of times in the past two years, I leaned over, slid the buggy door shut, clucked, and slapped the reins. Kenny plodded out the drive and lumbered down the road as the other buggies whizzed past us. We had three or four miles to go to get to Sarah’s house.

  I remember nothing of our conversation. She chatted about this and that. I mostly grunted in response. We traveled down the highway, then off to the side road leading to her house, the gravel crunching under the buggy wheels. I guided Kenny up to the hitching rail. Sarah moved to get out, but I held her back. Tonight I would not be tying my horse to the hitching rail. Tonight I would not enter her home.

  She looked at me with startled eyes through the darkness. And I spoke to her in curt, choppy sentences. I can’t remember my words to her in that moment—all I know is that I spoke to her, brutally and honestly. And after fifteen minutes or so, she walked alone into her home, stunned, crying, and heartbroken.

  There is no human penance anywhere that can ever atone for the wrong I did to her that night.

  * * *

  The news flashed through Bloomfield. Ira had broken up with Sarah. “Oh,” people gasped. “Weren’t they about ready to get married?” “What went wrong? Could it be that he just can’t get settled down? Can’t shake the ‘world’ from his mind?” And their gossip, as often as not, pretty much nailed it right on.

  I stopped attending the singings and instead stayed home, reading and brooding. During the week I still hung out at Chuck’s Café. It was my only connection to sanity, at least the way I saw it. My friends there realized I was going through some hard times, but they didn’t pry. They just quietly offered what support they could. And I held on to that world because it was a rock for me in the midst of those terrible days.

  My friends and family were around me like sad shadows—separated, silent, but there. To his credit, Marvin never confronted me in anger. Maybe he should have. But he didn’t. It wouldn’t have made any difference. He expressed only sadness, and we spoke about the matter only once. He broke down briefly, wept openly, a thing I
had never before witnessed. And then he let it go. We were friends from way back. He recognized and respected that. And he showed me the meaning of true friendship during those bleak days.

  I saw Sarah now and again, but I never talked to her much, other than an awkward greeting. She came around periodically to Titus and Ruth’s house, just down the lane. And one afternoon, after spending some time there, she walked up to our home to see Mom—at least that was the official reason. But she really wanted to see me. She had some things to tell me. I walked out with her to the banks of our pond, and we sat there on the grass.

  She asked about my plans, and I told her I was leaving soon. She nodded. Absently, she picked blades of grass and dandelion stems from the bank, wove them together, then looped the woven band and tied the ends together, kind of like a little bouquet. Or a heart.

  “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” she said, looking right at me. Her blue eyes were pools of infinite sadness.

  I could not meet those eyes. I looked down and mumbled incoherently. She still faced me.

  “These are my people, here in this community,” she said. She wasn’t pleading. Just telling me. She continued. “They are my family. I could never leave them.”

  I looked at her, startled. I had never asked her to leave with me. I hadn’t even remotely considered it. But it was important to her to tell me she wouldn’t go, even if I asked. I wanted to respect that.

  “I don’t think you should leave,” I answered gently. “If this is where you belong, stay here among your people. It’s not where I belong. I just can’t do it, Sarah. I’m so very sorry, but I just can’t do it. I tried. Believe me, I tried. I can’t do it. I’m so sorry.”

  It was a hard moment for both of us. I sensed the raw depths of her pain and felt the loss in her heart. But my own heart was far from her, and cold. Tears welled in her eyes. She nodded and looked away. I looked out across the pond.