Crossing Over (4 page)

Six

Irene . . . [there] still is a wrong and right way to live. We pray for you many times. Also, still burn a light at night. Again, I apologize for any cause in words or actions for your going, and pray to be forgiven by our creator and Savior.

—L
ETTER FROM
D
AD

T
he year before the Canada trip with Ottie, I had taken one of the most significant steps an Amish person can take. I had become a member of the Amish church.

Formally joining, which usually occurs after a person turns sixteen, represents someone's desire to make a lifelong commitment to the Amish church—and it is a process not taken lightly. In fact, people are commanded to join, and run the risk of being shunned if they don't comply.

Prospective members must attend nine Sunday classes—instructions of baptism—that review the eighteen articles of the Mennonite Confession of Faith, drafted in Holland in 1632.

They begin: “Whereas it is declared that ‘without faith it is impossible to please God' (Hebrews 11:6), and that ‘he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is the rewarder of them that diligently seek him,' therefore we confess with the mouth, and believe with the heart, together with all the pious, according to the Holy Scriptures, that there is one eternal, almighty, and incomprehensible God, Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost, and none more and none other, before whom no God existed, neither will exist after him. For from him, through him, and in him are all things.”

The document covers sundry subjects such as “The Fall of Man”; “The Restoration of Man through the Promise of the Coming Christ”; “The Advent of Christ into This World, and the Reason for His Coming”; “The Law of Christ, Which Is the Holy Gospel, or the New Testament”; “Repentance and Amendment of Life”; “The Washing of the Saints' Feet”; “Matrimony”; “Excommunication or Expulsion from the Church”; “The Shunning of Those Who Are Expelled”; and lastly, “The Resurrection of the Dead and the Last Judgment.”

It ends: “May the Lord through his grace make us all fit and worthy, that no such calamity may befall us; but that we may be diligent, and so take heed to ourselves, that we may be found of him in peace, without spot, and blameless, Amen.”

After the ninth lesson, we got on our knees before the minister's bench at the front of the church and were asked a series of questions, each having only one correct answer. They were asked—and answered—in German:

Q. Can you confess with the eunich, “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God?”

A. Yes, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.

Q. Do you also confess this to be a Christian doctrine, church, and brotherhood to which you are about to submit?

A. Yes.

Q. Do you now renounce the world, the devil, and his evil lusts, as well as your own flesh and blood, and desire to serve only Jesus Christ, who died on the cross for you?

A. Yes.

Q. Do you promise, in the presence of God and his church, with the Lord's help to support these doctrines and regulations, to earnestly fill your place in the church, to help counsel and labor, and not to depart from the same, come what may?

A. Yes.

After we correctly answered the questions, the bishop's wife removed the girls' head coverings. As the bishop cupped water in his hands above our heads, the bishop recited the baptism: “I now baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. . . .” Water streamed everywhere when the bishop's hands parted. Down our necks, our ears, and our faces. It was more than a drop or two. It was a shower.

The ceremony concluded with holy kisses from the bishop (for the boys) and from his wife (for the girls). The kisses were on the cheeks, though that would later change for some of the boys and girls. Bishops, ministers, deacons, and married men shake hands and kiss each other on the lips upon arriving at church. The women do the same among themselves. The practice essentially comes from the Bible, Thessalonians 5:26: “Greet all the brethren with a holy kiss.”

My joining the church came at a critical point in my life, for I had begun to notice other contradictions in the Amish way that didn't seem fair. And that's exactly how a teenager, Amish or otherwise, might describe them. Not fair.

Some post-school Amish teenagers—toughies or fence-crowders, we'd call them—would get away with alterations in their dress that, no matter how slight, nevertheless violated codes. Why, I thought, are the rules enforced for one person but not another?

And, although we were prohibited from owning phones and cars, we used them regularly. Phones were conveniently placed in barns or cloaked in shacks behind trees. Hired drivers like Ottie, meanwhile, traveled more than 100,000 miles a year, transporting Amish to friends, relatives, national steering committee meetings, or far-flung vacations.

It also seemed peculiar—not fair again—that it was okay to leave the Amish for more liberal orders like the Beachy Amish or the Mennonites, but it was frowned upon to depart to other denominations.

This philosophical dichotomy was evident just down the road from our farm. Buggies and horses would fill the driveway and yard around a house hosting Old Order Amish church services. Half a mile away, cars would fill the parking lot of a Mennonite church.

Which way was truly right? And if it was okay to morph into a Mennonite—and therefore own cars, wear more colorful dress, and let one's hair down—why couldn't a person become a Baptist, a Lutheran, or a Methodist without facing the threat of excommunication?

The Amish, pacifists to the end, will tell you the other denominations are warring churches; that they allow parishioners to engage in armed combat. And that makes them unsuitable houses of worship for Amish defectors.

But my sense was that the parishioners in the other churches believed in God just as much as I did. They prayed to the same God. They read the same scriptures, for the most part. They had the same desire to give their lives to Christ.

I also wondered, if the Amish were so privileged, if they alone had the key to God's graces, why were they so adamant about not ministering to other faiths? Wouldn't they, in good Christian conscience, want all of mankind to know about the route to salvation? Wouldn't they want to share their good fortune?

The Bible instructs Christians to minister afar in Mark 16:15: “And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.”

The Amish church didn't take long to feed my doubts. The first confessional involved my brother Elson. The Amish require that rubber wheels be taken off tractors and replaced with impeding spiked steel wheels—so people aren't tempted to use the tractors like cars. My brother had used the rubber wheels just once, but it was enough to require he confess. His brother-in-law, meanwhile, was a regular user of rubber wheels and had never been punished. I guess they were trying to make an example of Elson, but it didn't seem right.

As with my other concerns, I didn't mention any of these to anyone. I didn't dare. Thinking aloud too much, analyzing too much, would raise suspicions. And that would make life hard, if not unbearable. The Amish are always watching to see if a person appears vulnerable to doubt. It is their greatest fear.

The flock must be strong and unified to survive, they believe, and they often mention Noah tarring the ark to keep water from entering. Similarly, they say, the Amish church should be tarred inside and out to keep the world from seeping in.

The church and its inhabitants must never waver.

And so I didn't. At least not publicly.

But my growing, private misgivings would play a big role later—when everything was on the line.

The key distinction I made when I joined the church was that I had committed more to God than institution. To me, that was the purist route to faith.

Seven

Why, oh why, did you walk out on us like this, without a goodbye or a talk? The schoolchildren say Irene said she would show us how to make a kite and now where is she? . . . There are so many dark shadows you have cast over so many lives.

—L
ETTER FROM
M
OM

I
didn't stop thinking about Ottie after the Canada trip, but I didn't see much of him for the next three years.

Occasionally, I'd glimpse him as his van zipped down the road, and I'd hear Amish talking about him from time to time.

Mostly, though, my life was a mundane routine of work and sleep. I'd help Mom with the gardening, the canning, the mowing, laundry, and sewing. During hay season, I'd drive the tractor with the bailer behind it and the men would stack the flaxen stalks.

All the while, I was counting the years until I turned twenty-one, when I would be able to travel more freely, when I could see the world beyond the little shops, big farms, and manure-tinged air of Kalona. The Amish permit a person more personal choices after they turn twenty-one.

As luck would have it, my opportunity came earlier than that. In the dawn of 1994, Ottie began coming to our farm for foot treatments from my mother, a recognized reflexologist with a steady Amish clientele. Her massages would help ease Ottie's gout and tendinitis.

His visits were infrequently regular, if there is such a thing. Once or twice a week. Once every two weeks, sometimes. All hinging on when he'd be in from the road.

Having Ottie around once again filled my life with a joy, a freshness, that was intoxicating. It seemed so impressive that he was coming to our house.

I'd make any excuse to walk through the room where Mom was doing her reflexology, and Ottie and I would exchange pleasantries. Nothing remotely intimate, of course. Just friendly conversation.

But I found the more he visited, the more I missed him when he was gone. It was an ache completely foreign to me. Although I was now twenty, I still had not dated, and I had only the innocent notion that a feeling like this must be the sign of a blossoming friendship. A platonic closeness.

A couple of other interesting things accompanied the yearning. Ottie had begun taking pictures of Amish buggies—a hobby that he had turned into the business of making calendars. He'd also sneak in a few pictures of the Amish themselves.

He had to be adept. The Amish view taking pictures of people as something akin to making graven images: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (Exodus 20:4).

As such, the Amish will not pose for pictures, and they often adopt a look of disgust when they know their pictures are being taken. Further, businesses in heavily populated Amish areas often remind people not to take pictures of the Amish. One such place was the Stringtown Grocery in Kalona, where patrons could buy everything from muffin and bread mix to all manner of sugars and candies. “No cameras allowed,” a sign on the grocery's front door reads.

But Ottie would find a way around such restrictions. He'd shoot the Amish outright when they weren't looking. Or, he'd use a long lens, tell the Amish he was shooting their black buggies, then twist ever so slightly until the Amish came into frame.

I knew when he was taking my picture. I'd try to look disapproving, but occasionally I'd smile. Sometimes right at him. Chalk it up to another Amish contradiction—while many appear as though they dislike being photographed, inside there is a fascination with the process. Some Amish even enjoy watching English people stumble over themselves trying not to take a picture.

Ottie's photographing became important when I and other family members began taking more trips with Ottie behind the wheel. To Canada again, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, Tennessee, and the Smoky Mountains, a favorite of mine. And much later on, Florida, when my life began unraveling at blinding speed.

Traveling was the ultimate in learning. It gave me a chance to see things I'd only read about, sometimes things I'd never even heard about.

Ottie's photographic images from these trips, meanwhile, are tucked in photo albums that to this day allow me to enjoy, time and again, the glories of travel—and to look back on how I once lived.

Our trips brought me even closer to Ottie.

I had already begun a habit of baking him oatmeal-raisin cookies, or apple bars, or pumpkin bread, or cinnamon rolls whenever he'd visit Mom for treatments.

On the surface, they were harmless gestures. He was, after all, the family's driver, someone to be nice to.

But we both began to believe, separately at first, that perhaps our growing rapport might be something more. For my part, I knew that nothing could come of it—for several reasons.

The Amish believe that if a member of the flock marries a divorced person while their ex-spouses are still alive, it's adultery. Beyond that, marrying an English person would mean leaving the Amish, and both that and the adultery issue would mean being put in the ban. I would not be able to return unless I promised never to marry again.

Certainly, some people would also condemn a relationship with a man twice my age. I was now twenty-one, he forty-five.

I also felt obligated to stay and care for my mom. To protect her from my father. To be there when her health wavered.

In the beginning, I didn't spend much time contemplating the possibilities of Ottie and me, because anything more than a friendship simply wasn't possible. Ottie fostered the same understanding, although he increasingly found it hard to erase one particular image from his memory.

He had come to pick up my mother one sunny fall morning and had noticed me hoeing a flower bed in the front yard. I was barefoot and had on a long, dark blue dress—sleeves rolled to the elbows—and a light blue scarf on my head. He would later tell me the sun seemed to be bathing me in a halo of gold and, when a light breezed kicked up, it tugged at my dress, showing off my hips, legs, and waist.

“Hello, Ottie,” I said, walking to his van and brushing aside a tuft of hair that had escaped the scarf and landed on my brow.

“Hi, Irene,” he said. “I wish you could be going with us.''

“I wish I could, too, but I've got to take care of the house while Mom's gone.''

Ottie nodded, caught up in my smile, and for a moment time seemed to stand still. Then I remembered I had forgotten something. Ottie said he watched me, mesmerized by my gaiety, as I ran inside the house and returned, bounding off the porch in one leap, with a plate of homemade cookies in my hands.

He said later that's when he knew that, beyond any physical attraction, he was being drawn to me by my independence, my mental strength, and my radiant spirit. And I had begun to realize that, beyond Ottie's charm, I was being drawn to him by a kindness and caring I'd never known before.

I handed him the plate of cookies and, as I did, our hands touched ever so slightly, ever so briefly. We didn't acknowledge to each other—or even to ourselves—that this coincidental alliance was invigorating, but in hindsight it was.

The next time it happened, the circumstances would be altogether different.

On one of our summer trips—to visit relatives and friends across Indiana—Ottie arranged for me to be the last one let off, a rare circumstance since one of my brothers—or Bertha, my older sister—was always around to act as a chaperone. I was, after all, a single woman.

Ottie pulled the van to the side of northeast Indiana's Highway 20, between Shipshewana and Middlebury, and came straight out with it.

“Look, Irene,'' he said, “we've got a problem. My feelings for you are growing.”

“I feel the same way, but I could never leave the Amish,” I said.

“I know. And I'm not supposed to feel this way. You're so young and I'm so old.''

“I don't care about that.”

We looked at each other for a while, absorbed, suspended in a passionate gaze. Then he held my hand. Firmly.

“Anything I can do for you, I will,” Ottie said.

Currents of excitement—and fear—charged through me. I couldn't help but wonder if it was okay to feel this way. Was it a sin? I wondered. Would I have to openly confess in church? I hadn't really done anything. Or had I? Wasn't the issue what I felt inside, not what I had done?

Worst of all, I wondered, had I made myself vulnerable to the situation by more fervently embracing my discord with the Amish way? Shortly after I turned twenty-one, I had purchased a fifty-five-dollar harmonica, the only instrument allowed by my community. The reasons for the exception are unclear to me, but my motivations for buying the mouth organ were unequivocal. I loved music, and I was lashing out at my lack of freedoms.

Owning the harmonica was a guilty pleasure I could accept, and rationalize. Grasping Ottie's hand was another matter, and it sent me spiraling into a maze of confusion. This was not supposed to be happening—yet it was.

I had held hands with someone for the first time, violating fundamental Amish dating etiquette. To an outsider, it doesn't sound like much. But for me, my whole being had been turned inside out.

The first place I turned to when we got back to Kalona was the Bible.

Psalm 56:3–4: “What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee. In God I will praise his word, in God I have put my trust; I will not fear what flesh can do unto me.”

Isaiah 41:13: “For I the Lord thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, Fear not; I will help thee.”

If I could just hold God's hand long enough, I thought, everything would be all right. And for a time, it was.

Ottie and I managed to keep our emotions in check for the rest of the summer, and the leaves of fall brought a momentary diversion.

I started teaching school.

Every morning, I'd climb into my buggy—I had to hold on tight because it would list until I was in place—and head the three miles to the one-room Shady Lane School.

It was pretty typical for an Amish school, and similar to the one I had attended as a child. A white, wood-sided structure with a concrete foundation painted sea-blue. A little bell housing on the roof. Old, lift-top desks and chairs attached by a metal frame. A mammoth tree stump, a slide, swings, and a merry-go-round in a side yard. A ball field out back with short fences and a wood and chicken-wire backstop. A silver outdoor pump that took a dozen or so hard pushes and pulls to draw drinking water.

I had fifteen children in my classroom, and was paid eighteen dollars a day for my efforts—or about $2.40 an hour. Minimum wage standards did not—and still do not—extend to the Amish.

I patterned my teaching methods after a favorite instructor of mine at Centerville School. She was a robust, fun-loving woman who enjoyed children and upheld rules with a firm but compassionate touch. She was my teacher for the third through eighth grades, and she was a far cry from my first instructor.

I will name neither here, but my first one was a skinny, bony-fingered sadist who spoke with a lisp and delighted in punishing children to extremes.

There were a number of things that could land a student in trouble. Dropping books on the floor, because it made too much noise. Talking out of turn, because it was disrespectful. Looking or smiling at other students, because it suggested a lack of attention to the lessons. Cheating and passing notes, because what school doesn't discourage those?

I remember when that first teacher punished two friends of mine for passing notes by having them clean a toilet with bare hands and a rag. A brush was available, but she forbade its use.

Other times, she would punish students by having them stand in a corner with their noses pressed against the wall. And occasionally, she would draw a circle on the chalkboard and have the errant students stand before the board with their snouts in the bull's-eye. For ten minutes. Maybe fifteen.

It was utterly humiliating. I know, because even though I was a good student and a respectable child, I had my fair share of discipline. Once, I remember, I made the mistake of looking too long at another pupil in class. I wound up with my back to my colleagues and my nose in the circle.

That first teacher also dished out spankings with a wooden paddle. They were done out of sight of the rest of the class, probably after school, when she did a lot of her disciplining—just to inconvenience the accused, I suppose.

I don't think there was a child under her tutelage who liked the young woman, and I don't think there was one of us who was unhappy when the second teacher came along.

The second teacher also paddled children, but she was more yielding with her most common form of punishment: sweeping the floor during the third recess. And if you got done before the recess was over, you could go outside and join the other children.

As it turned out, I adopted the same reasonable discipline for my students. I also carried forth with an attitude of joy and caring, and borrowed from my second teacher such activities as putting positive messages or treats in plastic eggs and hiding them around the school property.

I even invited Ottie once to teach a Friday class in drawing, something I'd seen him do earlier when he decorated the inside of Aaron's hymnal with an eagle or drew pictures of places he'd visited in his travels. In class, he drew horses, buggies, cowboys, and cartoon characters. He also taught the children how to construct a person's face by drawing an egg shape, splitting it into quadrants and starting the eyes just below the center horizontal line.

The children were enthralled by such unbridled creativity.

I vowed I would never paddle a child, and in truth, I never needed to. When a teacher treats students with respect and admiration, the students usually respond in kind. At least they do in Amish schools. At least they did with me.

Teaching school gave me a sense of purpose and less time to think about my growing affection for Ottie. But in my weaker moments, I would let my guard down and my mind would wander.