“If we don’t go along with the plan, we are not going to get out of here alive, ever.”
“All right,” I finally agreed. “But if you don’t show up when you are supposed to, rest assured this time I will go to the police and report them.”
Samantha agreed to this idea, and I believe Mamma and Brian were already thinking I might do such a thing; at least I hoped so.
When we first approached the Amish community, after a long drive, I heard the clip-clop of a horse pulling a buggy. As we approached it from behind, Samantha grabbed my hand.
“That’s going to be us; can you believe it, Misty?” she whispered ecstatically.
I smiled at her, wondering if she had ever been this happy.
As we pulled in, Samantha and I brought our coverings forward so hardly a hair was showing. We straightened the new, dark blue dresses and black aprons that I had made for the occasion.
I opened the truck door so Samantha and I could hop out. We stood frozen for a second. A man with a long brown and gray beard and wearing a large black hat waved us inside.
“Come in, come in. You must be Brian,” he said with a thick Pennsylvania Dutch accent.
“Yes, and you must be the Bishop,” Brian replied, pulling his hat down further as if to appear more Amish.
“Oh, no…” The man shook his head and smiled. “I am Uriah Hostetler, the minister, but we thought it best if you came here since our family has daughters close to the age of your daughters. The Bishop is a younger man and only has small children, so we thought you would all be more comfortable staying here for the night.”
I thought he seemed like a nice person as he guided us into the main area of the large farm house. I looked around and smiled. This house had centuries of tradition screaming from every beam. There were light blue walls and plain, dark blue curtains at the windows. In front of one of the windows was a large quilting frame, and not far from the quilting frame were two treadle sewing machines with small, unfinished clothes hanging from them.
As we stood in the middle of the room, the man yelled, “Alma, children, come here!”
Out of the kitchen and through the side door tumbled twelve children, ranging from nineteen to one-and-a-half years old. Samantha and I were in shock as they stood there looking at us. The mother seemed to be a kind lady with gray hair popping out from under her stiff white Kapp.
“Nice to meet you! Nice to meet you!” she said in the same heavy accent as her husband.
Samantha and I just stood there. We had been exposed to so few social interactions, we did not know what to do or say.
“Okay,” the mother turned to two of her teenage daughters, “Matty and Laura, you can help the girls take their things upstairs and then come back down to help with dinner. Uriah, you can take Brian to finish choring, Ja?” She turned back to her husband.
As Brian and the Hostetler menfolk went out choring, Samantha and I followed Matty and Laura upstairs, where there seemed to be an ocean of bedrooms.
“Hey, they are really nice, huh?” Samantha whispered in my ear.
I nodded, pleasantly surprised by the family’s welcoming manner.
Matty, who was nineteen, stopped at one of the doors. “This is my room. You will be sleeping with me,” she said pointing at me.
I smiled. They seemed a little awkward too, which was a relief.
“Matty and Edward are the only ones who have their own rooms,” Laura said, walking down the hall. “I share this room with Eliza, and Samantha can sleep with us in here.”
I smiled at Laura, who was intently studying my face whenever she thought I was not looking at her.
“Oh yes,” seventeen-year-old Laura continued, “you will be wearing some of our extra clothes to church so you blend in and look more like us.” She looked at our dresses and aprons.
I had noticed that, although to any outsider we would all look Amish, our clothes were very different. Among the Amish, there are many subgroups, and among the subgroups are even more subgroups, all with their own strictly enforced dress codes. Here, the girl’s’ clothes were much neater than ours, I thought, and instead of zippers, the girls over eleven years old wore straight pins all the way from their high collars to the apron belts at the waist. They did not have black aprons, either, but matching aprons.
I was very excited to wear clothes just like theirs, to finally belong to something.
“Let’s see,” Matty said, pulling me from my thoughts. She looked us over, trying to determine what family member’s clothes would fit us best. Cocking her head sideways, she looked at my short stature.
“You are just a couple of inches shorter than Eliza, so you should fit into her extra church dress and apron.” Matty walked to the closet in Laura and Eliza’s room and pulled out a dark gray dress and held it up to me. It nearly hit the floor, but they seemed to think it looked fine. She rummaged around, looking for Eliza’s old white organdy church apron that was saved for emergencies. Laura went to her side of the closet and pulled out one of her church dresses for Samantha. It was a nice teal color and seemed like it would fit Samantha quite well. Amish dresses are made with long belts and a lot of material in the front that you just pin under, so that if you gain weight you can simply unpin some extra folds of the material rather than spending money on making a whole new dress and aprons.
As we made our way downstairs, I heard chattering and small children laughing in the kitchen. Dishes were clanging as two small girls who could barely reach the table slammed metal plates and spoons on the table. There was no Mamma or Brian beating anyone; these children looked comfortable as they raced around the kitchen. They were obviously not deathly afraid of their mother who playfully swatted their behinds, hurrying them to get the dinner on the table.
We sat at the table in order of our ages. There were so many customs to learn, I thought, but one thing I did know was that Samantha and me would pass any behavior test with flying colors. We were both quite rigid and used to doing what we were told immediately. I had noticed that the mother had to yell several times for everyone else to get to the table, whereas Samantha and I sat down as soon as the words came out of her mouth. Oddly, she did not seem at all put out as the children sat down, one by one. The girls sat on the right of the table next to their mother, and the boys on the left with their father. The line tapered down until the oldest boy and oldest girl were sitting at the end opposite each other, and then there was Brian.
“Let us bow our heads for a moment of silent prayer,” Uriah said and we all bowed our heads. I opened my eyes and peeked around the room. The kerosene lamp in the middle of the table was casting a soft glow as it flickered in the late spring air. I could hear the horses nickering to each other in the barn, and as I looked around I saw one of the little boys staring at me. I smiled and he grinned back. He was cute, his grin missing a few teeth. I can do this. These are nice people. And this is the only way to avoid going to hell.
After dinner, Samantha and I helped clean the kitchen while the men and boys sat on the long benches at the table. The boys played a game of checkers while Brian and Uriah talked and stroked their long beards. Brian was copying Uriah’s movements. He was actually a pretty good actor and could appear kind and sincere on a whim. But if you knew him and could look into his dark and evil eyes, you could tell it was all an act and he was laughing inside at the person who was dumb enough to believe it.
After the dishes were finished, Uriah clapped his hands. “All off to bed; tomorrow is church Sunday and we must get up early.” By church Sunday, he meant the church services the Amish held every other week.
We all hurried off to our beds. The parents slept downstairs while the children slept upstairs. Brian slept in eighteen-year-old Edward’s room while Edward bunked with his younger brothers
“I don’t know what time you stand up at home,” Matty said in her Amish-accented English, “but
we stand up at 4:30 a.m. here.”
I looked at the alarm clock that was ticking on the dresser. It read 9:30 p.m.
“That’s about what time we get up too,” I nodded, “but we usually go to bed much later.”
“Oh, really?” Matty cocked her brow. “Well, when it gets high summer, we do too, but not now; it is not necessary.”
I snuggled down into the lumpy cotton mattress and fell asleep. The next day, I would finally go to church. No one would beat me or try to hurt me. Maybe this was how life was supposed to be, I thought.
The next morning, Matty and I bounced out of bed with the sound of the alarm. The quiet, dark house seemed to bounce to life as Mom Hostetler’s voice floated upstairs in English:
“Children, time to stand up!”
When that did not work, I heard the deep, resonating voice of Uriah telling the children they had better get up: it was church Sunday. Samantha and I went with the four oldest girls to milk the family’s five cows. This was nothing new for us, and I think the girls were impressed with our milking skills.
“If you could speak our language, I would never know you were not born Amish,” Laura bubbled.
“Do you think it is going to be hard for us to learn German?” I asked, a little worried at having to learn a new language and knowing that my status would depend on how quickly I picked it up.
“I don’t know,” Matty shrugged. “We usually learn English when we start school; we are only allowed to speak English in school so we can learn it. I went through eight grades and my English is still broken, so I really do not know how you are going to learn German.”
“Yeah, it’s going to be tough,” Laura chimed in. “But also, it is against church rules to be speaking English amongst ourselves, so until you learn it you will feel like you are outsiders.”
Samantha and I looked at each other and shrugged; we would do our best.
After the breakfast dishes were washed and put away, all the children clattered up the stairs to start dressing for church. I stepped into the gray dress Matty handed me and tried to start pinning the front like Matty was doing. It took her less than a minute to pin down the front of her dress. She saw me struggling and smiled as she took the pins out of my hand.
“It takes all the girls about a week to learn how to do this so the pins don’t poke you when you are moving. See,” she pointed to her mouth where she was clenching pins between her lips, “just hold these in your mouth like this and then move your pin in and out of the dress front until you reach the end, like that.” She let go of the top pin.
I followed her advice and finished pinning the dress. Next came the stiff white cape that went around my shoulders and pinned in the front and to the dress belt in the back, and finally the stiff white apron that was only an inch shorter than the dress itself. I combed my long hair back and twisted it in a bun, then slid on the black Sunday Kapp. It is tradition among the Amish that unmarried girls wear black Kapps to church so the boys and men can easily tell who is unmarried. As I tied a neat bow under my chin, I looked in the tiny mirror on the dresser.
“I really look different,” I mused.
“Yep, you look like one of us.” Matty smiled as she placed the towel back over the mirror.
It felt good to belong to something. This was the most amazing day of my life.
Excitedly, I walked down the steps with Matty. As the teenage girls came down the stairs, I noticed that, one by one, they had to stop in front of their father for inspection, and he gave a little nod or a criticism. When he gave an order to Eliza, I asked Matty what he had said.
“Oh, he just told her to pull her Kapp further up on her head,” Matty answered. “We are only allowed to have two finger widths of hair showing, and it is better if Dad looks rather than the Bishop or other church members. There is nothing people love more around here than to wag their tongues. Just wait; you will find out soon enough.”
“Oh,” I nodded, not fully understanding the implications that could follow a tongue wagging. I had never had the privilege of gossiping, since there had never been anyone to gossip about on the farm, unless you counted Mamma and Brian.
“Okay, let’s go, let’s go,” Laura called from the door that she was holding open. “We have to hurry; it’s a mile’s walk over to Jacob C’s, and if we are going to make it by 8:30, we better move it.”
We set out walking as the buggy clip-clopped by with the parents inside. Brian and the four youngest children were all cramped inside too. More buggies passed us as we walked along the side of the road, and in front of and behind us were other groups of young people in their church clothes walking in the direction of Jacob C’s farm.
“Must be a big church, huh?” I asked Matty.
“Not really.” Matty looked around at the small groups of young people. “Only about fifteen families, but a lot have eight to twelve children, so it adds up.”
At the house where church was being held, there were many buggies out front. The men let the women and children off on their way to park near the barn. Samantha and I followed the unmarried girls, aged thirteen and over, into the wash house where we waited for our cue to enter the main room.
“We go in order of our ages,” Matty whispered to me. “Since you are going to be nineteen in a few months, you can just follow me, and Samantha can go ahead and follow Laura.”
I nodded, and we all stood there in silence. Hmm…, I thought, not as bad as I had feared. These girls are not very talkative. In fact, in the Amish tradition, women are taught that silence is a virtue, and if too much chatter is heard, the Amish father or mother will look at the girl in disapproval. The girls didn’t want to start any ‘tongues wagging.’
I felt butterflies in my stomach as the girls started lining up to enter the church’s main area. It was my first time at an Amish service, and I could not help staring as we filed in. The married women sat first, with the oldest sitting near the back while the younger ones sat near the front. Next came the unmarried girls, with the oldest going first. We filed solemnly past the married women, and one by one sat on a long bench in front of them, about eight feet from the minister’s bench. The men also entered in order of age; they sat facing the women. I sat stiffly for a moment as the eyes of the men, the ministers, the Bishop and the Deacon all looked us over from head to toe.
Now I knew what Matty had meant when she said it was better for the father to find fault with your appearance. It was not hard to see that the unmarried girls were the main topic of any “tongue wagging.”
A couple of minutes after we sat down, the unmarried boys filed in. I did not think it fair when I saw them clattering onto a bench behind the older men. I wondered why they got to sit in the back where no one could see them. But I knew, since it had been ingrained in me from an early age, that Eve had eaten the fruit first, causing man to sin; therefore, women were a source of evil and temptation, and needed to be closely watched until marriage, and after that, until they were no longer attractive.
As I sat there frozen, Matty nudged me. She picked up one of the thick, black church hymnals when one of the men started singing. I looked at the German writing; I was unable to read it, but I pretended I could all the same.
As the slow Gregorian chant reached its second verse, the ministers got up and went upstairs to a room prepared for them, where they would discuss the sermon for the day and church matters that could be handled by church members only. We had just finished our third song approximately thirty minutes later when we heard the ministers coming back down the stairs. The Deacon stood up, and we all turned around and knelt with our heads touching the benches as he read from the Prayer Book. Then the Bishop and ministers took turns reading scripture and preaching.
After three hours of sitting on the hard wooden bench, I could hardly keep my eyes open, and my head was nodding. I peeked around and saw that several people were sleeping. The boys i
n the back were sneaking looks at the girls sitting in the front and small children were quietly playing behind me. I realized that, like me, the church did not really understand much of the sermon because it was in High German rather than in the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect that the Amish spoke.
I was relieved when we finally closed with the final hymn and the girls filed out first, going upstairs to the girls’ rooms to wait for the women to call us down for lunch. Here, we split into two different groups: the younger girls who were thirteen to sixteen and not yet eligible to date; and the seventeen and older girls who were of dating age.
I sat on the bed and looked at the girls as they quietly giggled and teased each other about that night’s singing and who would be taking whom home. They were nice to me, and I could sense they had all been ordered not to ask me questions, which was a relief. About an hour later, the house mother called the girls to come down and eat. The married women, small children and men had eaten first, and now it was the young people’s turn. A few of the church benches had been placed in the middle for a table, with the other benches available to sit on. The lunch consisted of the standard Amish church lunch everywhere. There were stacks of homemade breads staggered along the bench-tables with little dishes of butter, homemade spread cheese, peanut butter, jam and pickles. There was also coffee and mint tea to drink. This was a very unique lunch, I thought, but it was tasty and a good way to feed this many people quickly. I winced as I watched Matty put the spread cheese, jam and pickles all on one piece of bread.
“Get ready for a culture shock just from our eating habits,” she laughed, licking her fingers. “You want a bite?” she asked, offering her bread to me.
Tears of the Silenced Page 8