Amish Confidential (4 page)

All together, my mom and stepdad had fifteen children, though Sam and Henry were around only some of the time and Katie, my oldest sister, got married around the same time my mother did. My oldest stepsister was also married. So we really only had ten or eleven children around the new house most nights. I say “only,” but it was still a lot of kids.

We all got along right away. There was a big, long table where
we’d all sit down to eat. The new house was a joyful place to be. I know it was tough for my new father. He had a lot of mouths to feed. But he never complained about anything. That’s how it was. We lived off the land. We had a big garden. And that’s how we survived. We’d butcher a steer and a couple of pigs every fall and then we were set for the winter. We had steaks and pork chops and bought some items at the store—but not too much. Mom did a lot of canning, which made the food taste better than freezing it. All considered, we ate really well.

We didn’t live like cavemen. Like most Amish families of the era, we had some semimodern conveniences. We just didn’t push it too far. In the living areas, we had kerosene lights. In the bedrooms, it was strictly candles and oil lamps. A wick drew up the oil, and that’s how we could see at night. It’s a little brighter than a candle, and that’s what we used to read.

We had diesel engines to run the milking machine and tractor. We ran our water with an air-pressure pump. My mother cooked with propane, and the refrigerators ran off propane, too. But the big deep-freezer needed electricity. To skirt the prohibition, we paid rent to keep a freezer over at a non-Amish neighbor’s house. We’d chop up some meat and freeze some sweet corn and keep it over there through the long Pennsylvania winters.

Even in winter, it wasn’t cold in the house. We had some wood fires but mostly we used coal. The coal burned longer and hotter. We had little vents going up the wall to the ceiling so the heat would rise upstairs. Still, upstairs was always a little colder. My parents’ room was downstairs. The kids’ rooms were on the second level. I shared a bed with my brother Chris. There was another bed in the room that Sam and Henry slept in when they were at
home. My three stepbrothers slept in another room—two double beds and a single. Same with the girls. They had two beds and four girls in a room.

Today, this sounds almost crazy. But when I was growing up, I couldn’t imagine living any other way. What else did we know? We didn’t live any differently from most of our Amish relatives, neighbors and friends. Mostly, I remember it as fun.

CHAPTER 3

LEARNING ENGLISH

W
hen I was little, we didn’t know many English.

The English—that’s what the Amish call anyone who isn’t Amish—could be young or old, black or white, native-born or immigrant. They could speak Spanish, Urdu or Swahili. To us, all of them were “English.” When your first language is Pennsylvania Dutch, which isn’t really Dutch but German, and most of the outsiders you encounter are prattling away in English, it’s no wonder that word has no particular connection to London, Oxford or Manchester.

It just means “not us.”

I wasn’t taught to fear the English, and it wasn’t until later that I started envying some of the cool toys they had. When I was growing up, the English just didn’t seem that relevant to our lives. They were the tourists who stared at us when we took the buggy into town. They were the people who lived down the road. We didn’t really
know
them. They lived their lives, we lived ours. We didn’t ask much from them or they from us. Mostly, we just wanted the English to leave us alone, and that seemed okay with them. My family, many of our neighbors, all of our friends—everyone I was close to was Old
Order Amish. If they weren’t official members of an Amish church, they were at least defined in Amish terms: ex-Amish, shunned Amish, raised by Amish or, God willing, coming back into the holy fold sometime soon.

We knew a few of our English neighbors. The Bohns. The Hoffmans. The Crouses. They were pleasant enough when you’d see them. They were happy to make little arrangements with us, especially when small cash payments were involved. We borrowed an English family’s telephone. We rented space in their garage for our freezer. We’d lend an occasional hand on their farms whenever they asked us to. But we didn’t hang out with them. Their kids weren’t coming over for playdates. The adults weren’t dropping by each other’s houses with fresh-baked bread. If they looked at us as odd though mostly harmless creatures, that’s about how we looked at them.

The only real sour note was our worry that, not being Amish, the English people might have trouble getting into heaven. That wasn’t something we mentioned to them. That would have been rude. But whenever we thought about it, it made us feel sorry for them. They might have had all manner of modern conveniences and labor-saving devices in their houses. But all those gadgets, we feared, would be mighty cold comfort in the face of eternal damnation.

E
ventually, some cracks began to appear in this sealed-off existence of ours. It was the Amish girls who usually got the first look inside the exotic, foreign world of the English, so different from the way we were living and yet right down the road from us. When my sisters and stepsisters got done with eighth grade, they started
picking up part-time work cleaning English peoples’ houses. They earned minimum wage or slightly better. You wouldn’t call the work glamorous, but it was all indoors. It was definitely easier than bundling hay or carrying milk buckets. And it had an additional benefit: Once those Amish girls got inside those English houses, they couldn’t turn their heads away from modern American living. They even got some hands-on experience.

“Everything runs on electricity,” my sister Sadie marveled, “even the door for the garage!”

“They have, like, three different machines just for cutting up food,” my sister Mary said. “I don’t even know why they need knives.” Truly, the girls had not seen anything like that before.

These people’s houses were stocked with every kind of appliance you could imagine. Sunbeam, Frigidaire, Kenmore—even the names sounded otherworldly to my sisters and their friends. In many cases, the young Amish housekeepers had no idea what these machines were for or exactly how to operate them. The English ladies had to teach their Amish housekeepers. What did these girls know about Waring blenders and something called a Cuisinart and modern washing machines? At home, our washing machine had two open tubs, a set of rollers to squeeze the water out and an air pump to bring fresh water in. The English people had Whirlpools with knobs and buttons and three different temperature settings—and electric clothes dryers, too. Some of these people had no clotheslines at all!

The learning curve was steep and sometimes rocky. One afternoon, my sister Sadie came home in tears. She’d had trouble with an Electrolux vacuum cleaner at work. Instead of adjusting the hose so the air would suck in, she had the air blowing out. I guess the
woman walked in and saw Sadie standing in the living room with a baffled look on her face, blowing dirt and dust all over the first floor of the house. Sadie didn’t know any better. At home we used a sturdy broom made of corn straw. She had never used a vacuum cleaner before. The woman exploded.

“What is wrong with you?” she demanded. “Do I have to hold your hand all day?” Sadie ran all the way home, saying she was never going back again.

Our dad had to go over and talk to the lady. I’m not sure exactly what he said, but he could be persuasive when he wanted to be. He managed to smooth things over, and Sadie went back to work.

She learned to vacuum. She also learned to appreciate the advantages of other labor-saving household appliances. It didn’t escape her notice that she was using these magical machines to do her paid work, while she and her mother and sisters were toiling with hand mops and feather dusters at home.

“They have nice things,” I remember Sadie saying after she’d been there awhile. She didn’t actually say she might want some modern things of her own one day, but I could hear it in her voice.

A
t about the same time, my older brothers and sisters were reaching the age of Rumspringa, when young Amish are invited to get a taste of the outside world. Rumspringa begins at age sixteen and usually ends with a decision to get married.

Give my siblings credit. They took up the challenge valiantly. My brothers even more than my sisters, I would have to say. They weren’t out robbing liquor stores or attending swingers’ sex clubs
(not that I know of, anyway), but given the place they and I had come from, they made some giant leaps. And they beat a path for me.

They learned to drive cars, though our dad would never let them park up at the house. They got their first radio—and when my dad busted the radio, their first TV. They sampled alcohol and maybe some other stuff, too. I was too young to do any of that. My brothers made at least some efforts to shield my tender ears, but I’d hear stuff.

This guy got drunk . . . This other guy kissed a certain girl.
They tried not to talk too much in front of me. They probably didn’t want to corrupt me too young. They also didn’t want me telling our parents. But it’s tough keeping secrets around any house, especially one as tightly packed as ours was.

One guy bought a car . . . Some girl was chasing after a certain guy. He kissed her when he wasn’t supposed to . . . Someone’s sister went out back and smoked a cigarette
.

None of this behavior could be called genuinely bad. For English teenagers these were just normal rituals of youth. The lines for Amish teens, of course, were drawn a whole lot tighter. Scandal for us was weighed on a far more delicate scale.

“Jake went to a concert with other members of the church,” my brother Chris announced one day, before quickly warning me not to say anything. I don’t remember who the group was, but they weren’t performing Christian hymns, I am sure.

The truth is, I wasn’t naturally discreet. I was a talkative kid, and I would talk to anyone, including my parents. To Chris and Henry and Samuel and the others, a talkative younger sibling could be a dangerous thing. I didn’t mean any harm by it, but I was always curi
ous. I wanted to know what was going on, and my older brothers were probably right to be a little careful around me.

One day, we were all up at the Farm Show Complex in Harrisburg, showing some hogs we had raised. That was something we did every year, bringing our best livestock to the farm show. Other families brought their sheep or horses or cows. A lot of Amish women showed off their homemade pies. But this particular year, the Farm Show Complex also had the Monster Truck Spectacular going on at the same time. My twin stepbrothers, Daniel and Samuel, slipped away from the farm show and spent the afternoon with the world’s largest and loudest trucks. I don’t believe anyone told them not to—not in so many words. But I’m quite certain that had he been asked, Jakob Ammann would not have approved of monster trucks.

I heard my stepbrothers talking about it later. They thought the trucks were totally cool. And while they were missing in action from our family outing and admiring the huge machinery, they ran across two Amish sisters they knew. The girls must have been monster-truck fans, too—or at least fans of the boys who were monster-truck fans.

Without really thinking, I innocently mentioned to my dad that the twins said they ran into the sisters at the monster-truck show. I certainly didn’t mean to get anyone in trouble, but boy, did I pack a lot of it into those few words!

My dad confronted my brothers. I’m not sure if he also told the girls’ parents, but somehow they found out. All I know is that everyone was blaming me.

“I can’t believe you told Dad!” Daniel yelled at me.

“We can’t tell you anything!” Samuel said.

“Thanks a lot,” one of the sisters told me when I saw her. “I hope you’re happy with yourself. Now we’ll never be able to go anywhere.”

The Amish are touchy like that. I swear, I didn’t even realize I was doing anything wrong.

As my parents often said:
“Kinner un Narre saage die Waahret”
—children and fools speak the truth. In hindsight, it makes me cringe.

L
ike it or not—and certainly our parents didn’t—the outside world was leaking in. As far as my parents were concerned, the old ways had been good enough for their parents and their parents’ parents and on back into history. Surely, those ways were good enough for us. For centuries, they had been good enough for the Amish. The teachers at school, the preachers at church, they constantly warned us to cast our gaze away from the temptations of the modern. That was fool’s gold, they told us, shiny but worthless. Those fancy baubles would lead us all down terrible paths. But the nineteenth century, which was more or less the one we were living in, was inevitably giving way to the late twentieth, even as all the grown-ups around us insisted such a thing could never, ever be allowed.

It got me thinking, I’ll tell you that.

I wondered why the Amish rules seemed to be applied so unequally. Why were some modern conveniences strictly forbidden and others not? An electric clothes dryer was the devil’s contraption, but a gas-powered water heater was perfectly fine. One kind of tractor was acceptable, another kind was not. When I put my young mind to the subject, the list of contradictions never seemed to stop. If the outside world was so fraught with danger, why were we letting
any of it in? And if it wasn’t, why were the old people making such a fuss? Some modern conveniences were clearly welcome improvements. Why not others?

I thought a lot about telephones.

If telephones were so awful and we must never have a phone in our house, why was it okay to use a neighbor’s phone when we wanted to?

The telephone thing really got me. I heard my father mention that several of his friends had installed telephones in their houses.

“How can they do that?” I asked my father.

“Well,” he said, explaining as well as he could, “the phone is just for business. They need it for work.”

But wait, wasn’t the phone a bad thing? Didn’t it sap our energy and steal our time? If it was okay to have a phone for business, why not for family things? None of this made any sense to me. To his credit, my dad didn’t try to pretend that it did.

“That’s just the interpretation,” he said, shrugging.

I could think of other examples, lots of them. If electric freezers were such a terrible thing, why were we renting space to keep one at the neighbor’s house? If we looked the other way when my older brothers were driving their evil cars, why did it matter where they parked?

For that matter, why was it that we couldn’t drive a car if we could ride in one as long as it was driven by someone not Amish? What sense did that make?

The older I became, the more these contradictions got to me. I understood being religious and praying to God. If you’re a Christian like I am and you believe in the Bible, you know that God made everything and everyone and dispatched his son down to earth. You
know that heaven’s up and hell is down and heaven’s a whole lot nicer. That much was clear.

But the questions kept coming. Why did all that mean that our family had to live like it was 1830 all over again? Why not the 1950s or the Stone Age? Why horse-and-buggies? Why not high-fin Cadillacs or Fred Flintstone carts? Was it just because the 1800s were when many of our Anabaptist ancestors came from Europe to America with the words of Jakob Ammann ringing in their ears: “Forsake the world”?

Is that why we were stuck where we were—no TVs, no toasters, no video games, whatever those were? Not even man-powered, pedal-pushing bicycles?

Actually, yes. That pretty much summed up why we couldn’t have those things. We didn’t because they hadn’t, and as far as the preachers were concerned, we probably never would.

The forebodings never stopped. If the Amish people ever got used to all those modern and just barely modern contraptions, we were warned, pretty soon we’d be worshiping stereo systems and central air-conditioning like everyone else did—instead of the Lord. Instead of paying attention to our families and the church, folks would be glued to televisions and jabbering away on telephones. Obviously, someone had this all figured out. All those labor-saving devices—in the kitchen and in the fields—would only make people believe they didn’t need their families or the rest of the Amish community anymore. If a woman could make a cake batter with a mixer, she wouldn’t need her daughter’s help anymore, would she? If a man could use a giant tractor to plow his fields, his son could be off doing who knows what. And if everyone started driving cars and speeding all over creation, how would anyone keep the tradi
tional family close by? Before you knew it, the Amish would be like everybody else.