My Amish Childhood Read online

  In the other direction was Johnny Gascho’s place. Uncle Johnny had married Mom’s older sister Martha. He was a thin wisp of a man and mild-tempered to a fault—a trait that followed in his sons. It was the women who made the noise around the place.

  Uncle Johnny’s two oldest boys, Luke and Noah, were good friends of ours. They would sometimes invite my brother John and me to stay overnight. These visits we greatly enjoyed. One morning at breakfast I became aware of Uncle Johnny regarding me intensely. They had served pancakes along with real maple syrup made from their own trees. That was something we didn’t get at home. I loved maple syrup and had poured liberal amounts on my pancakes. Clearly Uncle Johnny didn’t approve of visiting little boys making off with his maple syrup. But he never said a word. I quickly finished eating, but I didn’t pour any more maple syrup on my pancakes.

  From there—to the east and north again—the hallowed grounds of Pathway Publishers were just around the corner. The building was low, hugging the ground. It was unpretentious compared to what went on inside. Pathway put out three monthly magazines designed especially for Amish readers. The aim was to contend for the faith primarily through the medium of story. Pathway printed our generation’s first Amish fiction, and people came from far and wide to visit the place.

  Inside, the assembly line hung from the ceiling—long spindly arms of wires and metal tracks. Grandfather Eicher, his hands stained with ink and his smile spread from ear to ear, would show us around the printing presses. Each page of the magazine had been transcribed to a master sheet and was spun around on rollers to create others like it, all in ways I didn’t understand at the time. It was a land of wonder for me. A place where words spoke from paper. I already knew I loved books and stories. I hung out for long moments in the small bookstore off to the right of the main door. I had no money to spend, but being close to the stories was joy itself.

  The place where my desire for books reached fever pitch was further down the road. I went there with my friend Ira Wagler on occasion. His father, David Wagler, had a red railroad caboose parked in his front yard. It was loaded with books to sell—lots of them. Huge shelves full of worlds that beckoned me away from the world in which I lived. There the entire Mother West Wind series by Thornton Burgess was on display. There I discovered the adventures of “Reddy Fox,” and “Jimmy the Skunk,” and “Peter Rabbit.” I made do with the occasional copies people gave me—Ira, mostly. He allowed me to choose a book for free when I went home with him as an overnight guest. I dreamed of the day when I would own the entire set, which, for some reason, never happened. Likely because I spent most of my childhood far removed from such luxuries.

  Friends like Luke and Ira were precious to me. More so on my part than theirs, I’m sure. I was already tall and skinny for my age. I was clumsy and spoke with a terrible stutter I didn’t even realize I had at that point. That, coupled with a naturally aggressive personality, meant I wasn’t always the most pleasant child to have around.

  Chapter 3

  My memories of Grandfather Stoll’s house return in flashes. I see strawberry patches—long, long rows of them. And I’m tagging along with the adults as they harvest the berries. I must have been quite young to not be helping. All Amish children begin working early.

  Aunt Mary claims I was always a sad child. Coming from her I don’t doubt it, but I have no idea why I was that way. She always had a soft heart for people, and I was drawn to her. Outside of my immediate family, she was the person I felt the greatest affection for in my childhood—a feeling that seems to have gone both ways. Aunt Mary was a special woman. If there was someone hurting, she would be the first one there. She would go where others dared not. Even with excommunicated people, she was allowed special privileges.

  Once when Uncle James—who had been placed in the bann—visited, Aunt Mary was the first one to cross the fields to greet him and give him some degree of welcome. Only then did a few of his brothers approach. A year or so earlier, Uncle James’s wife had left him, and he’d been unable to resist the charms of a neighboring Englisha woman. Adding tragedy to tragedy in Amish eyes, a second marriage had ensued, and the result was Uncle James being put in the bann.

  Aunt Mary also has the rare distinction of being married to a converted Englisha, David Luthy. Uncle David, as a young man, had studied for the Catholic priesthood, but through contact with my Uncle Elmo, David was drawn to the Amish lifestyle. He visited and liked the Aylmer community, eventually settling there. And not unlike many converts, he turned out more Amish than many a born-Amish man.

  Today, Uncle David still works at Pathway, and he’s collected the largest Amish historical library in existence—the Heritage Historical Library. I’ve seen him quoted for background material in Amish novels and in prestigious university works on the Amish. Stoll and Wagler bravado aside, it was David Luthy, with his Englisha education, who supplied the refining touches to the Pathway endeavor.

  The last of Grandfather Stoll’s natural-born children, Aunt Sarah, was a fragile girl. She suffered an injury in a buggy wreck prior to the Honduras move and spent months in bed recuperating, never seeming to fully recover. I remember visits to her sickbed with Mom. One of them was made memorable by the thrashing I received afterward. I had been told to be quiet during the visit. Instead, I ran up and down the stairs the whole time. Mom didn’t make much of a fuss, which I calculated would have ensued if the matter were truly serious. My miscalculation became apparent once we were home. I ended up with my behind warmed that night. And I was never one to take spankings graciously.

  Just beyond Pathway lay Grandfather Eicher’s place. The family lived in a long, white house with large windows in the front. Toward the back, the house had a wing attached that included the mudroom and woodshed. A portion of the house had an upstairs, the roofline leaving the welcoming sweep of the front windows unaffected. Here the sustained memories of that period of childhood reside. I find that strange now. I would have thought they’d be at Grandfather Stoll’s place or even at home. But they are not.

  I remember the prayers at mealtimes around the long table. Grandfather Eicher would lead out in his singsong chant that charmed and fascinated me. It was as if he knew a secret he wasn’t telling us. Some hidden pleasure he’d found that we could not yet see. I remember him always laughing. That was how he approached us grandchildren, his white beard flowing down his chest, his face glowing. And it didn’t take a special occasion to put him in such a mood. It was as if we were the occasion.

  Grandfather Eicher was a minister back then. Once, after we’d returned from Honduras, our hearts aching in sorrow, he approached me in the washroom and said there had been complaints that I was singing parts at the Sunday-night hymn singings. He told me, “We don’t do things like that around here.” He laughed as he said it, and I knew someone else had put him up to it. Grandfather Eicher wouldn’t have cared one way or the other whether a few bass notes were growled at the hymn singings. But I nodded my agreement. There would be no more parts singing on Sunday nights.

  I never knew another man who could make a person feel so at home, yet he never drew close, as if his heart was always far away.

  His preaching is still a distinct memory. When I remember him speaking, I see his face lifted toward the ceiling, his hands clasped in front of him, his white beard flowing over his arms. He could chant a thousand miles an hour, or so it seemed to me. A person could lose himself in that voice. It was as if I were enveloped in love and acceptance. In his preaching, he was never going anywhere particular. He had no agenda. He simply exalted in the holy words, as if he were glad to be part of such a great thing.

  Grandmother Eicher could chatter during the week about as fast as Grandfather Eicher did on Sundays. She’d say hi, give out a long stream of words, and then bustle on. There was always something going on at her house. She came from Arthur, Illinois. Grandfather made contact with her from his world in Davies County, Indiana. My guess is they met when he visited Arthur on wee
kends for weddings or funerals, typical Amish reasons to travel to another town. Grandmother Eicher had a great sorrow in life. She’d lost her first love under tragic circumstances before she could marry him. She never forgot that.

  The Eicher men worked during the day, either in the fields or on construction jobs, so my visits to Grandfather Eicher’s place were always populated with women.

  Aunt Rosemary, the youngest aunt on the Eicher side was petite, the prettiest of the sisters. She would end up marrying a rather cultured Amish man from one of the trackless Northern Ontario Amish communities.

  Aunt Nancy could move about as fast as Grandfather and Grandmother could talk. She was the shy one, even with us children. She would tilt her head in that peculiar way of hers, as if to deflect some incoming missile. She would marry one of the Stoll cousins, a man who stuttered as I did, although not as severely. Perhaps she had her own sorrows from which her heart reached out to a fellow sufferer.

  Aunt Martha was the jolly one, always smiling and happy. I never saw her that she wasn’t bubbling with joy. She was also a diabetic from early childhood. I remember she gave herself insulin shots in the leg and allowed us children to watch. I knew nothing then of the sufferings of a diabetic, and still don’t, except from secondhand sources. But it could not have been easy for her. She never married. I don’t think I ever heard of a suitor, either. It was just one of those things. Her kidneys gave out in her early fifties, and she soon chose to forgo dialysis rather than hire a driver to make the long trips into town. Her decision was influenced perhaps by the expense or simply from the weariness of suffering.

  It must have taken great courage to walk so willingly over to the other side. But then I can imagine Aunt Martha facing it in her life lived in cheerful acceptance. I suppose she was welcomed home with more joy than many of the earth’s great people. I know she lived close to the Father’s heart.

  Though most of my childhood was spent in Honduras surrounded by the vigorous intellectual life of the Stoll relatives, it was from here, at Grandfather Eicher’s home, that I draw the characters for my Amish fiction writing. The white walls, the long dinner table, the open living room, the small spotless bathrooms, the yard outside with its swing tied high in the tree. And above all, from the feeling of simple living. It’s here that life slows down. It’s unpretentious. These people profess to be nobody special. There’s a minister in the house, and later a bishop, but you wouldn’t know it. They laughed a lot.

  I’ve not always lived like that. Being honest, I’ve hardly ever lived like that. Life has been a hard climb, and each peak only reveals another. In those moments when I come home, this is where I come to. To Grandfather Eicher’s house.

  I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am.

  Chapter 4

  On a typical day, Dad would drive his cart or buggy into the town of Aylmer, where most of his construction projects were. The distance was considerable for horse and buggy travel but doable. I suppose that’s why the rules of the ordnung were later strengthened to state that no Englisha driver could be hired by the men who worked in construction. Rules made by farmers who viewed all work outside the family acreage with suspicion. Rules made to limit Amish involvement in Englisha endeavors.

  Dad often brought home store-purchased ice cream wrapped in layers of paper bags to keep it cold. I know that homemade ice cream is now considered a delicacy, and I can’t say I disagree. Perhaps the recipes have changed since those days, but back then we children gathered around Englisha ice cream with our mouths watering. There were few things we appreciated as much as Dad bringing home this treat in his toolbox.

  Mom increased our delight in the goodness of our father by telling us that Uncle Leroy, Dad’s brother, ate the ice cream he bought before he arrived home, leaving none for his family. Whether this was true or not, I never inquired. But the tale served its purpose, and Dad’s gift grew large in our eyes. I could easily imagine Uncle Leroy licking the last of the melting ice cream from the paper wrapping minutes before he arrived home.

  Our other taste of Englisha life was when a salesman stopped by to sell Mom some sort of nutritious orange drink. At least that’s what he claimed it was. Good for what ails you, and absolutely necessary in the development of growing children, he said. We gathered around, wide-eyed, at the kitchen table as precious samples were measured out for our tasting. But that was as far as things went. The salesman left without his purse fattened, and we without our hearts gladdened for the coming day. Mom always sent him away with no orange drink left behind.

  Our barn stood to the west of the house, a nice affair as barns go. New construction, of course, as all our buildings were. Dad had applied considerable thought to our place, pushing the limits of design a little for an Amish man. He was like that, always nudging the ordnung’s fence when it came to his business.

  There was even talk in those days of joining a more liberal church within the Amish world. Talk on Dad’s part, that is. Mom would never have consented.

  Dusk was falling by the time Dad arrived home on winter evenings, the glow of the gas lantern shining and welcoming in our kitchen window. He unhitched near the barn while we children raced outside to meet him, glad for a diversion after our day at home with Mom. After Dad took care of the horse, we trooped back inside with him.

  Our house had a back door that opened to split-level stairs, one half going to the main level, the other to the basement. It was the only Amish home in the area with that feature that I know of. Probably a design taken from one of Dad’s construction projects in town. Another reason, I suppose, he unwittingly contributed to later efforts by the Amish farmers to stop the further influence of the Englisha world by adding more limits to interactions between the two cultures.

  Mom had supper on the table by then, set up just inside the stair door. I remember only silence at supper, our vague forms sitting around the table. We were a quiet bunch. There were six of us children by the time we left for Honduras. Sarah Mae, the seventh and youngest and cutest, would be born on foreign soil.

  After supper Dad would work in his small machine shop he’d built between the barn and the road. Already he’d begun to tinker with what would become his main businesses when we moved to Honduras—welding, metal lathe work, and basically anything else that involved metal.

  People were always bringing over things to be worked on, and one day someone dropped off a lawnmower—the old self-propelled kind with a rolling drum blade. It was after dark that evening, and I was playing outside while Dad worked in his shop. I pushed the lawnmower around in the yard, playing at cutting grass. The machine must have needed its handle fixed, because there wasn’t one attached. And somewhere in the midst of my fun, with my back bent over and hands holding the frame to propel the mower, my foot ended up in the drum blade. I remember no blinding flash of pain—just running into the shop to report that something was wrong. What, I was uncertain of.

  I don’t know where all the people came from so quickly, but suddenly they were there, gathered around me. A sizable number of them followed as I was carried over Dad’s shoulder into the house. He set me down and examined my foot. Half a toe was gone. Someone ran over to the schoolhouse to make a phone call, and a car soon appeared. A neighbor, probably summoned from his dinner table, arrived. From there things get dim. I wasn’t in pain that I can remember, but soon hospital walls appeared, and someone placed a mask over my face. And then I was out cold. I spent several days in the hospital with nothing memorable happening. Half of my toe was gone, but I don’t remember being all that concerned. But obviously I haven’t forgotten it either.

  In the lore that passes through Amish mouths, I heard years later that a child under seven will grow back such shorn extremities if the body part is left alone. Apparently such wisdom was unknown to Mom and Dad—or disbelieved if it was. With a choice in the matter, I would have taken the chance. The injury can always be sewn up later if necessary.

  It was from this house that Susanna and I set
out one wintry afternoon. Mom had broken her last glass shade used on kerosene lamps—the only light we had for the bedrooms. For some reason it seemed important to Mom that those lamps be lit. So Mom wanted us to walk down to Bishop Pete’s little store, a sort of all-around Amish specialty place the bishop kept in the middle of the community.

  We weren’t very old, obviously, and hard to convince of the wisdom in this journey. Finally Mom prevailed, and we were wrapped up and on our way. We were shivering, not from the cold but because there had been tales in the community of wolves spotted running in the woods up north. It didn’t take much for me to see them hungrily devouring two small Amish children. Susanna’s imagination wasn’t that difficult to arouse either. (When I began writing fiction, she told me she was glad to see at least one of us doing something profitable with the wild Eicher imagination.)

  Susanna and I pressed on in our journey, convinced to proceed not by the goodness of our hearts or from forced obedience. Mom had bribed us with a silver dollar apiece, so we didn’t think of turning back. I remember snow blowing across the road, but we were well bundled up. We’d suffered no harm from the weather by the time we arrived at Bishop Pete’s little store.

  The bishop wrapped the purchased lampshades in paper bags and took the money Mom had sent along. We told him nothing about the silver dollars. The trip back was as uneventful as the coming had been. I’ve never forgotten the terror of watching the north woods with a pounding heart or peering across the fields for the first sight of long-legged wolves taking form in the driving snow.