Why I Left the Amish Read online

  When Mem finally came in, I showed her my toe. Blood oozed from under my toenail, and my toe looked flat. I was still sniffling after my sobbing. My toe still hurt, but more like someone was pounding it with a hammer than the feeling that the toe had been broken off. She gave me water in a wash basin to soak my toe while she scolded Datt with her sharp voice: “You can't even take care of the children while I am outside doing your chores!” He sat with his arms folded across his chest, and he kept his lips pressed together so hard, it looked as though he had no mouth. Mem kept scolding: “You could have gotten her cold water to soak her toe!” Still Datt sat there and said nothing.

  Mem stomped around the kitchen making supper. When she finally put the vegetable soup on the table and said, “Supper,” I didn't complain. I didn't like vegetable soup, but I was hungry enough to eat almost anything. I had dried off my toe and put my black stocking back on.

  Datt got up from the rocking chair and moved to the table. He waited until we were all gathered around the table and then said, “Händt nunna” (Hands down). Before and after every meal, we would all put our hands in our laps and bow our heads for a silent prayer. Datt would signal the end of the silence by sliding his hands off his lap and picking up his water glass. Mem reached to dip the soup into our bowls. Usually she served Datt first, but this time she set her jaw and took our bowls one at a time, starting with the youngest—Baby Susie's, then Sarah's, mine, Lizzie's, and Joey's. When we were crushing crackers into our soup and blowing on each spoonful to cool it, Mem finally served Datt, then herself. Then quiet set in, the kind that made me afraid of what would happen next. The fear that lived inside the quiet was like a bottomless black pit. Sometimes, when I went to bed at night, I would feel that blackness inside of me. Then one night the blackness took the form of a horrible nightmare.

  The dream started out much like real life, with Datt sitting on his rocking chair. He sat without rocking, his arms crossed over his chest, as Mem scolded him. I waited, thinking they would start arguing at any time. But Datt just sat there, without rocking or saying anything. I played with blocks on the floor, one eye on Datt, as Mem's angry and impatient voice continued.

  Suddenly, Datt jumped up from the rocking chair. His feet hit the floor in a shuffle. With wild and clumsy footsteps, he ran over to the hand sink. He bent over and pounded his head hard into the porcelain sink. To my horror, the top of his head broke off and lay there in the white sink. There was no blood, just the pale color of Datt's bald head, as it rocked back and forth like a bowl with a round bottom, its edges jagged, like a broken eggshell. Datt stood there with no top on his head and said angrily to Mem, “Now do you feel better?”

  When I screamed myself awake, the horror and fear became a palpable thing in the room—something I could have reached out and touched, though I didn't dare. I couldn't hide or shrink from it, I couldn't beat it back, and I couldn't run from it. I was hot under the covers of the bed I shared with my sisters, Lizzie and Sarah. Mem came and stood over our bed and asked what the matter was. Between sobs, I stammered out what had happened in the dream. Mem said, “It was only a dream; now go back to sleep. I'll leave my door open so you can see the light.” She tucked the covers around me and went back to bed. I couldn't say to Mem, “But it was just like real; maybe it could really happen.” I looked at the dim light coming through the open door, and slowly the sobs turned into the hiccups that Mem called “sniffling.” I couldn't push the horrible images out of my head. I wanted to go to sleep to escape it, and yet I was afraid of dreaming again. I tried thinking about something good, but everything inside me felt black. When I finally did fall asleep, it was mercifully a dreamless sleep.

  I awoke in the early morning light as Mem was waking my older brother and sister, Joey and Lizzie, for school. The memory of the dream was more bearable than the dream had been.

  There were other nights in my childhood that were frightening. The night “the Yankee” came into our house and disturbed the whole family, I wished I could awake and find it was all a dream—but it was all too real.

  Datt was working up at the Hale Farm doing chores that summer. He carried milk from the barn to the milkhouse. During evening chores, Datt had a run-in with a man living in the area who was considered crazy. People shied away from him whenever possible. The Amish all called him “the Yankee” (Yankee was a term for someone who wasn't Amish). At dinner, Datt related the story of how when he was carrying milk, the Yankee had parked his car in the path between the barn and the milkhouse, so Datt asked (or most likely demanded) that the Yankee move his car. The Yankee refused, and an argument ensued in which Datt told him he had no right to make his job harder than it already was. I knew the Yankee because he came to buy eggs from Mem every week. He often smelled bad, and he had a demanding and demeaning way of treating Mem. Once he had the audacity to ask her to cook some eggs for him, and she would not say no. While she was getting out her cast iron skillet, he asked if she had ever cooked anything with lard in the pan, and she retorted, “Not since I washed it!” The Yankee reluctantly agreed to eat the eggs Mem fried for him.

  The night Datt had the run-in with the Yankee, the air was hot and heavy in our bedroom. My nightdress stuck to me whenever I turned. I rolled back and forth, trying to find a comfortable position. Not only was I hot, but I had an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  Something rumbled in the distance, and then the walls of our room lit up. It was a car coming into our lane—in the middle of the night. I sat up in bed. The car stopped, the engine shut off, and the door banged.

  “Simon!” a man's voice shouted. The fear I felt from that raspy voice calling Datt in the middle of the night made me lie back down very quickly—I wanted to disappear into the bed. It felt like my heart had stopped beating, yet I could hear it thundering in my ears. The voice called out again, this time louder—“Siiii-monn!” Then someone banged on the door.

  “Everyone stay really quiet,” I heard Mem whisper from their bedroom next door to ours.

  I scooted closer to Lizzie. In the light from the car's headlights, I could see that her eyes were wide open and staring.

  “Who is it?” I whispered to Mem through the open doorway between us.

  “It's the Yankee. Shhhh!” she whispered back.

  “Si-monn!” the man shouted at our dark house. The outside door creaked open and footsteps came up the stairs into the kitchen. Lizzie grabbed my hand under the covers, and Sarah made a little squeaking noise. I hoped Baby Susie, in Mem and Datt's room, would not wake up and cry. No sound came from Joey's room.

  “Datt,” Mem said in a low hiss, “go down and see what he wants!”

  Datt said, “I'm not going down there. Just be quiet, and maybe he'll go away.”

  The Yankee didn't go away. First he rattled the handle on the water pail on the water stand and shouted Datt's name again. Then he walked over to the bottom of the stairway and opened the door. He yelled up, “Siii-monn!” Mem and Datt whispered some more, angrily.

  Then I heard one of them get out of bed. I held my breath as I listened to Mem's footsteps going to the top of the stairs. She called down into the darkness: “What do you want?”

  “Eggs!” the Yankee said.

  Mem spoke again, and I could tell she was trying to sound calm, though I heard the trembling in her voice. “What did she say?” I whispered to Lizzie.

  “You woke up the children,” Lizzie whispered. “Come back tomorrow and I will give you the eggs.”

  The Yankee shouted something else. Lizzie translated: “I'm hungry and I can't sleep!”

  Mem stepped down into the darkness of the stairway.

  All I could think of was that this man could hurt Mem.

  After what felt like a long time, I heard Mem say something out loud. She came up the stairs quickly and said to Datt, “I gave him two dozen eggs. Now if he doesn't go, you will have to deal with him!” She wasn't pretending to be calm any more, and her voice sounded scared. “He smells te
rrible. I think he's been drinking!”

  The Yankee muttered something, and then we heard the door open and close. The car started, and its lights moved across the walls as he drove away. All became quiet again.

  Mem came into our room.

  “Why did he want eggs in the middle of the night?” I asked, sitting up and looking through the darkness at Mem.

  “I don't know. Lie down, Lomie,” she said, and pulled the sheet over me. I noticed her hands were shaking.

  I lay down, but like the rest of the family, I could not sleep. I wondered if someone could die from being scared. It seemed as if the darkness that lived inside me could take over and erase me altogether.

  First thing the next day, Datt went to the hardware store and bought two big aluminum brackets and nailed them on the inside frame of the outside door, and got a sturdy two-by-four to drop between them at night, barring the door. Lizzie gave a sigh of relief when she came home from school and saw it. At first I felt safer looking at it, too, knowing the Yankee couldn't come into our house in the middle of the night again. This was Datt's way of trying to protect us, but I also knew it was too late. What I discovered that night—that Datt could not be counted on to protect his family—was a reality that instilled fear in me long after I knew that the Yankee had moved out of town and would not disturb us again.

  I kept thinking about that bar across the door, knowing it was too high up for me to reach. Instead of making me feel secure, the barred door made me feel trapped. Danger didn't just come from outside our house—it lurked in every corner.

  The most disturbing aspect of the Yankee's intrusion into our home that night, though I did not know it at the time, was that my mother was very pregnant with my younger brother, Simon.

  THE SOUND OF THE DOOR closing down the hall brought me back to the present. Other “Adas” were arriving at the Victorian house on Green Street for another week of studies at Smith College. I went down to the kitchen to make myself dinner. I warmed up leftovers from the dinner I had cooked with David the night before—steak, green beans with almonds, and rice pilaf. I was getting into the rhythm of a typical week at Smith—classes and homework during the week, and then returning home to Vermont to be with David for the weekend. I loved my world at Smith as much as I loved being with David, but my transition back to Smith was a bit harder because I missed David. We talked on the phone every day, but it wasn't the same as being with him.

  I sat down at the end of the table in the common dining room to eat my dinner. I could see down into the kitchen of the Green Street Café next door. As I watched the movements of the people in the kitchen, my thoughts drifted back to Datt. I tried to remember how long he had remained in his depressed state of rocking and not working—as a child it had seemed like several years, but it might have been only one winter. There were certain times of the year when he would work, such as in the spring when he and Mem made maple syrup, and when he did chores on the Hale farm up the road from us.

  I knew that Datt's mother had helped shape him into who he was. Both Grandmother's and Datt's medieval religious beliefs lived in a little black German book. Datt would take the book from the desk and settle into his rocking chair after supper. He would hold one of us on his lap and show us the pictures in the little black book, Die Herzen der Menschen (The Hearts of People). The book had pictures of men and hearts—with good and bad things representing what was in their hearts. As Datt showed us the pictures, he would say, “See—there is no room for both good and bad in our hearts. When the bad things come into our hearts, the good things have to leave.” He pointed to the pictures to demonstrate. I once asked Datt, “How do we keep good things in our hearts?”

  “We have to do the things God expects us to. Children need to obey their parents. Parents need to do what the church expects. If we do these things, God will reward us when we die,” he said. Then he told me a story . . .

  “Once our family made a big fire to burn hecka (brush) after my datt died. The fire burned hot, with flames reaching into the air far above our heads.” Datt's voice became louder and his words came fast when he said, “Mem gathered all us children around her by the fire and said to us, ‘This is a small fire compared to hell. Even if you were to burn in this fire, it would be nothing compared to the pain of the hell fire. Satan is ready to throw children into the fire with his pitchfork if they don't obey their parents.’

  “My mem told us that for our own good,” Datt said, finishing the story.

  I slid off Datt's lap and realized I was more afraid of his mother than ever before. I asked Lizzie if she wanted to stack blocks with me.

  The beliefs that Datt derived from the little black book influenced his way of thinking. If he truly believed that there was no room for both good and bad in his heart, he would have thought he had to be perfect to be good. Of course he was not perfect—in fact, on some level he probably knew he was less perfect than most—and so he worried that he was bad through and through, and most likely damned.

  Grandmother used Datt's fears to control him. She wielded an unusual amount of influence on our family. It never made sense to me why Mem allowed Grandmother so much say in our family matters. I know that Mem felt sorry for Grandmother, but that still doesn't explain why she allowed Grandmother to make key decisions for our family. Once Grandmother arrived at our house as Mem had gotten back from grocery shopping. Grandmother went through all the groceries, telling Mem what she could have done without. When Mem told this story, she told it in a neutral voice. I asked her why she allowed Grandmother to do that, and she launched into stories about the hardships Grandmother had endured in her life.

  When Grandmother was six years old, her mother died. Grandmother was the oldest child in her family. Her father remarried fairly quickly. Grand-mother's stepmother sounded like she had walked out of the story of Hansel and Gretel—she was very cruel to Grandmother.

  Whenever the stories of Grandmother as a child didn't get the desired effect, Mem would tell us about the hardships Grandmother endured as an adult—how she lost her husband during the Great Depression, with five children and another one on the way. Even though the family could grow most of its own food, they still needed some money for buying other things. Grandmother had the back-breaking job of digging potatoes for a dollar per day.

  It didn't matter how many times Mem told us these stories, I was too scared of Grandmother to feel sorry for her. She was so stern, she didn't even like it when we laughed or giggled, and she didn't like it when we saw our reflections in the mirror. She believed that as soon as a child knew what a comb was for, then the child was old enough to be spanked. And she firmly believed that Amish girls should play with homemade faceless cloth dolls, and not the plastic ones with faces. Other Amish girls could play with real plastic dolls, but Grandmother and her sidekick, Aunt Katie, who only reinforced Grandmother, were stricter than any other Amish people I knew. It seemed to me that Aunt Katie was training to be just like Grandmother when she grew old. Both were tall and thin and had long hawk noses. Age was the biggest difference between them—Grandmother was the kind of person who I imagined had always been old, and Aunt Katie only needed some more years to get there.

  Grandmother and Aunt Katie brought their very own darkness with them when they visited us as a pair. Everything around them was black—the buggy, the horse, and their clothing—giving their already severe demeanor and outlook more emphasis. They had appeared on the morning after one of my most frightening childhood memories.

  MY SISTERS AND I had been sitting at the table, eating bread and milk before going to bed. The oil lamp cast a faint yellow light around the kitchen, and rain drummed on the windowsill outside. The pungent, smoky smell of the oil lamp lingered throughout the house. Mem was preparing us for bed. Datt was sleeping in the rocking chair in the living room. We could hear Datt snoring as the floorboards above us creaked with the weight of Mem carrying Baby Simon to bed. She came down the stairs, through the dark living room, and then sh
e stepped into the kitchen doorway. She nearly filled the doorway with her wide hips. She had our sleeping caps in her hand, and suddenly she squeezed them very hard as she gasped and cried out. My sisters and I gaped with open mouths, our spoons halfway to our mouths. We watched helplessly as Mem reached up with both arms, as if she was grasping at air, and then she dropped face down onto the floor in the kitchen doorway—Thud! Everything became still—there was only the sound of the rain dripping onto the windowsill outside. We were all too shocked to move. Then Joey, who was upstairs, suddenly came running down the stairs, and Datt awoke and scrambled towards Mem and kneeled next to her. He looked up and said, “Joey, go to the Sykoras and tell them to call the ambulance!” He called my mother's name, “Kettie!” and tried to rouse her. She did not wake up. He half-carried and half-dragged her onto the couch in the living room. He looked around and said, “Girls, go to bed!” We fled up the stairs to our beds. I lay on my back, breathing hard, too scared to move or talk.

  When Joey came back from the Sykoras, he came upstairs and stood at his window and stared outside. Downstairs there were strange voices and banging noises. I wondered what was happening. All at once Joey cried out, “I think Mem is dying! They are taking her in a stretcher to the ambulance!” He ran through our room, then Mem and Datt's bedroom, and down the stairs. I wanted to cry, but I was too scared to. I had only a vague notion of what dying was, but the panic in Joey's voice conveyed the seriousness of the situation. My sisters and I got up and looked out our window as the ambulance drove slowly down our lane, carrying our mother away. I listened to the sound of the gravel crunching under the tires of the white station wagon, and I wondered whether Mem would ever come back.