My Amish Childhood

by Jerry S. Eicher

  With half of my face numb from the dentist office, I would make a mad rush to catch the noon bus back to Guaimaca. And then began the bounce home again on the four-hour trip. By the end of the day I would arrive back where I started, sick of life in general and of travel in particular. A trek indeed that was not for the weak of heart or stomach.

  At his store, Grandfather Stoll established a clientele for the staples of life—corn and beans. But even that work tired him easily, and the doctor advised a slower pace due to his heart trouble. Grandfather, though, had things to do. He stayed in bed sometimes, but he was soon up again, driving around in the cart pulled by his horse Silver.

  Mom visited her parents frequently, walking up the lane to the main house with us in tow. And not just because of Grandfather’s illness, but also because she was lonesome for home. She never took well to the foreign soil of Honduras.

  In the midst of this, the Stoll children worried over Grandfather’s health. But what was there to do? Honduran medicine wasn’t the most advanced, and heart treatment, even stateside, wasn’t that great back then.

  Aunt Mary left in the spring of 1971, headed back to Aylmer for her wedding to David Luthy. The adults whispered behind their hands that any real man would have come down and picked up his bride…perhaps even holding the wedding in Honduras. But Luthy was having nothing to do with the community. So they wrote it off to the eccentricities of an Englisha man. I figured Aunt Mary loved him, and what she loved couldn’t turn out too bad.

  Below us to the west and across a little ravine but still within sight, Uncle Stephen built his house on a knoll with a walk-out basement, the first such venture for the community. The hole was dug out of the hillside with a giant scoop hitched to the freshly arrived Belgians.

  I went over to watch this experiment of basement-digging with horses. Uncle Mark was in charge and determined. As the youngest boy of the Stoll family, he didn’t lack in grit or determination. An adventurous soul, Uncle Mark never seemed to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders like his older brothers did. He was sure the basement could be dug with his contraption, and he was not giving up.

  The machine scraped back and forth, digging in deeper while the Belgians strained in their harnesses. When the scoop was full, the drivers brought it out of the ground and hung on to the handles while the Belgians headed for the hillside. There the handles were let go, and the scoop flipped over, depositing the load over the edge. And back they would go for another load.

  I didn’t stay for the whole thing, but Uncle Mark got far enough along with his scoop to finish easily by hand. No small feat to say the least, and one that Dad tried to duplicate a few years later without success. Our gentle sloping hillside turned out to be a layered rock slab, which the scoop couldn’t dig through even with Uncle Mark’s best efforts.

  Uncle Stephen’s family always stayed to themselves more than Uncle Joe’s did. More like his dad, Uncle Stephen was introspective. His oldest boy was James, a husky lad with a mild stutter. He was the one who would marry Aunt Nancy Eicher in Aylmer once his family moved back.

  Uncle Stephen’s next two boys were twins. Thin little fellows and short in stature. They must have shared their growth cells between themselves, but they turned out cocky for their size and smart as whips. There was not a school lesson they couldn’t get an “A” on.

  My memory tells me one of them was the Stoll cousin from whom I copied the correct answer at the Aylmer schoolhouse. I would have been in the first grade, and they were always a year ahead of me in school, so it doesn’t make sense why we were using the same books. Perhaps it was some subject that the two grades shared, which is common in Amish parochial schools. They never liked me, that much I know. But then I didn’t exactly blame them.

  The younger brother was Harold. A kind soul, he always seemed quiet. A misfit for the family for some reason, though I could never put my finger on why.

  Nancy was the youngest. A girl finally, and valued highly in this family of boys.

  A ridge ran from Uncle Stephen’s house toward the north, then turned in a “U” shape back toward the west and south. On the opposite side, Uncle Stephen built his barn. From there you could see the river bottom containing some of the finest black soil in the community. If you lifted the dirt with your hand, it ran freely through your fingers. It would grow anything in the rainy season and a second crop in the dry season when watered by the canal ditch that ran in from the north. Or, as Dad did later, with water from the river using irrigation pumps.

  Further up there was a smaller strip of river bottom with the same characteristics. I don’t think anyone tackled that section the first year. Not until Uncle John Martin settled there after having married Aunt Sarah. Their adopted boy named Louis, “Loo-wes” we called him, came from Belize. He would become my friend, though he didn’t let anyone get too close to him. But neither did I, so we suited each other well. And he did know the local culture better than any of us ever did, which fit my wandering spirit.

  Produce-raising in the community soon went into high gear. Fences were put up to keep out the locals’ cattle, which were allowed to roam free. Cattle that were skin and bones, mostly. How the locals kept track of them, I never figured out. Perhaps they didn’t care. Occasionally a stockowner outfitted his animal with a contraption tied to the cow’s neck consisting of two sticks placed in a V shape over the neck and one crossbar on the bottom to hold it apart. Strapped together this made for clumpy walking, but it kept the animal from crossing most fences.

  Dad’s machine shop was also catching on and brought in more business. We soon had trucks roaring in from the main roads from early morning till dark each night. They came with busted springs and cracked truck rims. Sometimes if the job took longer than a day, the trucker would camp out under the trees beside the shop for the night. Phones were nonexistent in the countryside in those days, and likely his wife, living in a hut, didn’t have another vehicle to pick him up with anyway.

  Mom would take them supper sometimes, but not always. The truckers were highly impressed with a white woman. And it didn’t matter really how she looked. They would watch Mom take each step with broad grins on their faces. They were a chauvinist lot and confident of their charming powers, but the Amish never feared assault on the Amish women by the local men. Though a few Amish girls did succumb to those charms in their rumspringa years, to the great chagrin of the community’s elders.

  Dad’s shop.

  At the shop Dad soon found his tools disappearing at a rapid pace. He took matters into his own hands by putting up signs that read, “Eyes Are Watching You.” In Spanish, of course, with the words written beneath a pair of eyes that looked everywhere. Playing on guilt, I suppose. He had the biggest one placed on the open top of his big red toolbox on wheels. I don’t think the thieving stopped completely, but it slowed things down even if most of the locals couldn’t read. I guess the guilt thing worked along with the eyes staring at them. Most of them were nominally religious.

  One thing was clear enough. Few of the locals could be trusted when we weren’t looking. Taking what wasn’t theirs was almost an honored tradition there. It went something like this: “What has no owner in sight must surely need one.” Which they were more than willing to supply.

  This rule excluded their own families, with even a few exceptions there if someone was corrupt enough. But for the average decent guy, taking something from those who had more than enough to supply the needs of those who didn’t was considered a right of poverty.

  Dad became an expert at amateur thieving prevention. He’d turn his rotary grinder with its long spray of sparks toward anyone who wandered too close to his toolbox. The sting of the fiery stream never harmed anyone, but the men would scurry out of the way while Dad grinned, safe in the knowledge his actions would be written off as accidental.

  In the end, though, Dad learned to get along with things the way they were. The truckers always wanted to borrow tools. Losing hand tools was part of
doing business in that part of the third world. Perhaps he calculated it into the fees he charged. Even checking carefully when they brought the tools back didn’t always take care of the matter. I had a trucker gang once who treated me to sardines in the middle of a project—a rare treat for us in those days. This happened when I was working full-time in the shop. I ate the delicacy with my greasy fingers straight from the can. When the job was done, I opened and counted the returned ratchet set like I’d been taught. Everything was there. The men waved cheerfully on their way out the lane. Dad later informed me they had switched several of our good sockets with their cracked ones. Well, we lived and learned.

  One man showed up at the shop on a Sunday afternoon and wanted work started on his vehicle right away, pleading great necessity. Dad refused even when the conversation descended into a theological discussion on whether the Sabbath started on Saturday or Sunday. From there it moved to whether it was from sundown or sunup. Dad held his ground, but he did get up that night at midnight to work, and the poor fellow was on the road early the next morning.

  Chapter 11

  The David Peachey family, a happy, cheerful bunch, came from Pennsylvania and settled in by spring. They built their house just above the children’s home and church house complex, where the old lane turned west toward Grandfather Stoll’s place. David and Miriam came with their five children, David Jr., the eldest, and Rebecca, the first girl. Joseph, the second boy, would become the closest thing I had to a friend besides Louis. Rhoda and Daniel filled out the rest of their family. Joseph epitomized the family’s good nature and gracious kindness. I never met a person who didn’t fall in love with the Peachey family. They needed this trait, I supposed, sandwiched as they were between the two Amish cultures from Aylmer and Northern Indiana. But in the end it didn’t help. Even with their strong ties to both parties, nothing it seemed could bridge the gap between the two.

  I wasn’t old enough to get involved in the church kafuffles, but I had my own wars. At the center were two boys from the La Granja ranch, Daniel Hochstetler and Paul Schmucker. They were a year or so older than I was and a grade ahead of me in school. Paul was Minister Vernon Schmucker’s son and a follower mostly. Daniel was the brains and leader of the duo.

  That I was the gangly, stuttering, forceful boy that I was didn’t help matters. They took delight in terrorizing my schooldays. Daniel’s parents had stayed in Dad’s chicken house for the first few months after their arrival in Honduras until their long, rambling house was built over in La Granja. During this time Daniel took or damaged something of mine. I think it was a marking pen. He refused to right the wrong, so at school, during recess, I took matters into my own hands and took an equivalent item from his desk. Triumphantly I carried it back to my desk, a feat I made sure Daniel was fully aware of once school was back in session. I held up the item so he could see it. Daniel immediately raised his hand and reported what he called “a theft” to Aunt Sarah, who was teaching that year.

  Aunt Sarah marched over and asked if I had indeed taken the item.

  I tried to explain my side of the story, but with my stuttering it didn’t come out right and took too long to say. I could tell the verdict was already decided in Aunt Sarah’s eyes before I finished. No student of hers was going to lift another’s property. Not for any reason.

  Aunt Sarah returned the item to Daniel after an appropriate lecture for me. Daniel rubbed the conquest in by making gleeful faces as soon as her back was turned.

  Beyond that, the two boys found small ways to make my life miserable, ganging up on me once on the long walk up the schoolhouse hill after recess. On one such day, Paul still had his mouth filled with water after taking a drink at the well pump. Daniel walked on the outer side of him, and as Paul came up next to me, Daniel hollered out my name. When I turned, Paul emptied the whole mouthful into my face.

  I’d learned by then to leave the two alone. And who would have believed me anyway if I’d complained? They would have had some logical explanation to explain their innocence against which my stuttered complaint didn’t stand a chance. I suppose I was my worst enemy, doing little to counter the negative impressions I gave off. I bristled and fought at the slightest provocation, even with the Stoll relatives, most of whom had nothing against me.

  Uncle Joe’s oldest boy, Paul, once made some remark about me while the group of us schoolchildren were walking home. I have long forgotten what it was, but I took a swing at him, connecting with his head. The rest of the group looked at me in shocked horror, while Paul rubbed his injured body part. Fighting was strictly forbidden. No Amish boy was supposed to lash out. We continued on, and no one said anything until we arrived home. Then my transgression was immediately reported to Mom. She made a beeline out to the shop, coming back with Dad in tow. I could talk well enough at home to explain myself, and I repeated what Paul had said. Apparently it was bad enough that some sympathy was evoked because I wasn’t thrashed. Instead it was decreed that I should go down at once to Uncle Joe’s and apologize for my reaction.

  I refused. Not because I was opposed to apologizing, but because of the horror that I knew lay ahead. I would end up on Uncle’s Joe’s front porch unable to utter a single coherent word with them staring at me.

  Dad told me he would thrash me if didn’t go. I managed to croak out that I couldn’t talk in front of people. Mom must have had compassion on me because she said, “John can go with you. He can tell them what you want.”

  So with my brother John beside me, I walked up and down the slopes to where Uncle Joe’s house lay. I stayed at the little wooden walk-through by the fence while John went on up to the house. When Paul arrived, I stammered out that I was sorry, and he graciously accepted the apology. I believe Uncle Joe’s family really tried the hardest to break through whatever was bothering me, but I repeatedly rejected their advances. The world had become much safer for me when I stayed alone.

  Some years later, during a ball game in the schoolyard, Uncle Joe’s second boy, Peter, was moving in on a fly ball along with me. In the last mad dash, Peter accidentally pushed my glove aside. I ended up with a softball in my glasses, shattering them into a thousand pieces.

  I had to go home from school that day so Dad could pick glass pieces from my eyes. There couldn’t have been a boy more apologetic than Peter. He profusely said so in the schoolyard. And I knew he was. I never doubted his sincerity. But I wouldn’t acknowledge it, even when Peter walked back up that evening for another round of apologies. I had closed up by then, and except for Joseph Peachey and Louis, I kept largely to myself.

  Uncle Joe lost three of his sows that spring of 1971, right around Easter. The family woke up to find them simply gone. Not a sound or disturbance had been heard the night before, which puzzled the Stoll clan immensely. They liked mysteries, but not mysteries that couldn’t be solved, and this one baffled their best efforts. How did someone sneak in and move three hogs without causing a racket? Usually a person only had to look at a sow to cause a terrible fuss. They talked about the matter at great length. They seemed more concerned with the mystery than with the loss of the pigs.

  Uncle Mark came up with the most imaginative explanation. It was Easter time, and he noted that booze was plentiful among the townspeople. Some creative local had imbibed the sows, he claimed, and in their stupored state they had been led off without a sound.

  A faint trail of hog tracks was found leading through the woods toward the main road, where the tracks vanished. This supported his theory, Uncle Mark claimed, because it showed the hogs had not been driven. If that had been the case, the tracks would then have been scattered helter-skelter. And if the hogs had been killed, there would have been drag marks and blood from where they’d been butchered. Instead, the tracks led forth in a nice straight trail that even a drunk sow could make if she were being led by a rope.

  When some of the local help found out about the theft, they proclaimed Uncle Mark’s theory totally plausible. The Stolls were satisfied the my
stery had been satisfactorily explained.

  In the meantime, other thieving continued in the community. Small things that were appropriate to the habits of the local population, it was decided. Nothing of grave concern. Better locks were purchased and installed, precautions unknown to us when we lived in Canada. Clearly this land was not like the one left behind, but we were all beginning to love it.

  Chapter 12

  With the church house functioning, Bishop Wallace Byler and his wife showed up for the first communion that year in June—an event looked forward to with great anticipation and hope. Communion in the Amish world is an important affair. This is when the state of unity is fully tested because there can be no communion if there isn’t agreement on all matters. And this is more than simply agreeing to attend church together or tolerating each other’s positions. One person must agree with another on a substantial level, giving consent to his opinion. It’s a monumental task, and one of the reasons the Amish are often resistant to outsiders joining the faith. They have enough work cut out for themselves keeping those raised in the faith of one mind without bringing in someone who doesn’t think like them.

  Somehow the community had unity that year. And not only the unity to hold communion, but enough to also ordain another minister. There were two ministers already on the ground, Richard Hochstetler and Vernon Schmucker, plus the one deacon, Uncle Stephen. This was a sufficient number from which to ordain a bishop, and the option Bishop Byler wished to employ. An action that would release him from the necessity of further trips to Honduras. But there were objections. Another minister must be ordained before a bishop was chosen, they said. Objections to which I ascribe ulterior motives. Perhaps the Stolls were attempting to gain an equal voice on the ministers’ bench. Or maybe they simply wanted another choice so they would be kept from having to vote on either Ministers Richard or Vernon.