Crossing Over (7 page)

Twelve

Since you left, our family has reunited in togetherness and there is nothing between mom and I anymore! We are very, very sorry if we were the cause for you to leave us. I ask you to forgive me in all areas where you feel I have wronged you or mom.

—L
ETTER FROM
D
AD

T
he letters began arriving shortly after we moved into a tiny, $200-a-month square of a house at a crossing in Uno, Kentucky, northeast of Horse Cave.

They would become a constant reminder of where I had come from and what I had done. They would—and still do—tug at my conscience, testing my will and my conviction.

The first was dated June 14, 1996, and it included remarks from every member of my family. My father began the missive and the rest followed:

To Ottie and our dear dear Irene:

Greeting in Jesus' name.

We with broken hearts want to tell you we are very sorry for anything that would have caused you to leave our home, Irene.

Since you left, our family has reunited in togetherness and there is nothing between mom and I anymore! We are very, very sorry if we were the cause for you to leave us. I ask you to forgive me in all areas where you feel I have wronged you or mom.

Irene, you are always welcome in our home, and come before it is too late! Never think the Lord cannot forgive the sin of adultery.

There is forgiveness where there is true repentance!!!

Pray for your salvation and we and our church are all praying for you.

Your broken-hearted father,
Dad

My mother was next.

From your heart-broken mother:

Irene, this is the hardest thing in life I've had to face. Please, please forgive me for anything I've done or said that caused you to do this. Dad and I have made amends and the family, but it's so lonely, dark, and empty without you. I don't see how we can face people anymore.

The neighbors, relatives, and friends have come to comfort us. . . . It was very touching.

After church, the people didn't eat much and were very quiet. At the singing, they sang mostly wake songs. Everything is so sad.

O Irene, you can still come back. People are all praying that you will. People are so concerned about you. Can't you feel the prayers and the tears for you? . . . I feel so torn up, weak, and sad. I also have heart pains, so I don't know if I'll get to see you here again, but I will never cease praying for you as long as life permits. . . .

 

Then my sister.

My dear and only sister Irene:

It is so lonely here without you to go to bed with. . . . I'm sorry for all I did wrong. The song has left our house. The nieces and nephews don't know what to do without you!

Please forgive me if I did anything wrong.

Your only broken-hearted sister,
Bertha

And my brothers.

Things are different, Irene. You can't imagine it.

We hope we can all work together from now on and we hope and pray that someday you can be here to help us. We miss you!

Sincerely,
Wilbur

Dear Irene:

O Irene, please come home!

I just about can't put it in words how I feel. Please, oh please, forgive me for what I have done wrong. Please give us another try before you go too far!

You can't imagine how the days were spent Sat. eve, Sun., Mon., and Tues. Lots and lots of tears and many, many friends came to share their sympathy on Sun. and Mon.

O please come home, Irene!

From your brother full of faults,
Benedict

Dear Irene,

If words could only write the deep grief of my parents, how I would try to put on paper what they are going through. And I could find forgiveness if I had a part in you doing this. . . .

Please don't feel anytime that you can't face the ones at home because you are welcome.

Your brother wishing you were home,
Aaron

Dear Irene:

O please come home. Our home is so empty. We miss you very much.

From your brother,
Earl

O please Irene,

Please come home and try this reunited family. You cannot imagine the difference.

Hope to see you soon!!! We still love you greatly.

Elson

In all honesty, I couldn't imagine the strife within my family had vanished between the day we left (June 8) and the postmark on the letter (June 14). It seemed inconceivable that my parents could patch up their differences in six days, or that my brothers and sister could forget all that had gone on before.

In time, I would discover my hunch was right. I learned that my father would preside over letters sent to me, dictating the content and context of the messages. Any appearance of unity, therefore, was rehearsed.

Most of the letters were also addressed to “Ruth Irene Miller,” or “Irene Miller,” or “Irene, c/o Ottie Garrett.'' The latter was rare. More often than not, it was clear my family did not want to recognize Ottie's place in my life, and perhaps even desired to drive a wedge between us.

Worse, I learned, when I'd send birthday and holiday cards to family members signed Irene and Ottie, the correspondence would often be burned.

Then there were the letters that can only be described as cruel, particularly one from my father after I'd tried to explain why our marriage was sound in God's eyes:

We received your letter yesterday. . . . It broke our hearts again to see you try and use scripture to cover such an evil deed. Mom just cried and cried and finally she said if only you could have died when you fell out of the upstairs window. You wrote you have not died. We hope and hope you can repent before you're spiritually without life.

The reference to the fall cut through me like a scythe.

I knew my mother couldn't possibly have said it. And if she had, it almost certainly was at the prompting of my dad.

In any event, to tell a child you wished they had died—or wished they'd never been born or wished you'd never had them—has to be one of the harshest forms of mental abuse.

I could try to put an Amish spin on it and say the remark was similar to the one my father had made about my brother after little Tobias died. Tobias would never again be tempted by the devil. I would never again be tempted by the devil.

But I took it differently. I had so disgraced them by leaving the Amish that my death was preferable to my life.

I was about Tobias's age, three or four, when I fell from the window. Summers, Bertha and I would move our bed next to the window so we could benefit from the nighttime breezes. One night, in my sleep, I rolled over against the screen and plunged two stories, headfirst, into a cement well at the edge of a flower bed. The force of the impact knocked me out.

When I came to, I walked around the house to the front porch, knocked on the door, and was let in by my parents. I told them what I thought had happened, but we didn't seek immediate medical attention beyond visiting a chiropractor.

About a year later, I began having horrible headaches and stomach discomfort, and my parents took me to a hospital for tests, which proved inconclusive. When the symptoms continued, we consulted an Amish doctor and he concluded I had fractured my skull. The bone on one side of my head, he said, had developed a ridge at the break.

He put his hands firmly on my head and began pushing, trying to re-break the bone so it could set properly. The pain was excruciating and the recovery long. It would be several years before the headaches stopped.

My parents' somewhat guarded attentiveness to my injury was common; the Amish would rather nature take its course than intervene. My mom broke her arm once and when the doctor told her to come back for checkups, my dad said, “Can't you just let nature tell her if she has to come back or not?''

Part of it was the reliance on nature, part of it was he didn't want the medical bills to run up. In the end, the doctor gave in. My mother didn't go back.

Sometimes, my father would seem to soften in his letters, although they always sounded as if he was more concerned with himself than with others: “I would seriously long to see heaven when my life is over and I need peace with you,” he wrote.

Sometimes, he'd even tell me he loved me—something he'd never done when I was at home.

But I couldn't escape the years of abuse or the years of suggesting a problem was someone else's fault, not his.

If he could lay the blame elsewhere, it somehow absolved him of any wrongdoing. This was evident when Rick Farrant, my coauthor, visited his farm in the spring of 2000 to talk about the book.

My father opened the front door with a handshake and wide smile that turned to an icy stare when he learned the purpose of the visit.

“I don't want any part of it,” he said. “I just wish you'd cancel the whole deal. That would be a blessing to me.”

“Why do you want the book canceled?” Rick asked.

“Because it's wrong. It's evil.”

“But it's important to get both sides of a story. And you have a side.”

“I've said this before. I don't want any part of it.”

He looked down and shook his head several times, a mannerism he would repeat often during the next fifty minutes of tortured conversation.

Then, as he leaned against the partitioned entrance to the living room, thumb and index finger fastened around a suspender strap, he asked if the discussion was being tape-recorded. It wasn't at that moment. And now, it wouldn't be. The record would be left to the author's years of practiced recall; the kind that is jotted down the moment an interview is over.

Alvin talked about how he had tried to be a good father while at the same time upholding the strict rules of the Amish church.

“The scripture,” he said, “doesn't bend to me. I'd like to think I bend to the scripture.”

He denied being abusive to his children, said that “of course” he loved them, and suggested that if Ottie hadn't come along, I wouldn't have left.

“If Ottie doesn't come here,” he said, “I have to believe Irene's still here.”

Asked if I might not have played some role—of my own volition—in leaving the Amish, he turned to my mother, who was sitting at the dining table, elbows planted firmly on its oak top, head in hands, face covered.

“Well, what do you think, Mom?” he asked her.

That was another thing he would do over and over during the conversation, as if he were trying to shift the tough questions—and perhaps some of the blame—to her.

Sometimes she would answer. More often, she would remain still, leaving a painful silence in the room.

“Can you think of any reason why there's such a rift between you and Irene?” he was asked.

“No,” he answered. “Mom, can you?”

No response.

Later, referring to the news articles, book, and perhaps a movie that would chronicle my life, he said, “There are a lot of people who've left the Amish, and they don't do this.”

“Does that mean your reputation among the Amish has been tarnished?”

“No,” he answered. “Mom, can you think of any way it has?”

“If it has,” she said, “we haven't heard about it.”

How strange they would say that, I thought later. In one of his letters, my father had written in German:

It hurts so much that I have a daughter that is disobedient! And the New Testament says how the minister's children should be obedient, and what a mark you make on us. And how serious when I am supposed to stand up in church again! The ‘mark' that we and our children carry now hurts!

At the far end of the dining table, a pair of eyeglasses sat atop an opened Bible, keeping the reader's place. A yellow and green parakeet chirped busily in a cage hanging from the ceiling in the modestly appointed living room. Bertha, doing chores, periodically entered the spotless kitchen off the dining room to listen, but dallied only briefly before shuffling away. She smiled once at the visitors. My parents, backs turned, couldn't see her.

“Do you still want Irene to come back?”

“Yes, I want her to come back,” my father answered. “How can she think I don't?”

“But if she comes back, she can never marry again. Isn't that right?”

“If she can humble herself to come back, God will take care of that,” he said. “She will lose her taste for marriage.”

“She will?”

“She will.”

But if there was anything I would lose my taste for, it would be for the sometimes inflexible, narrow-minded ways of the Amish.

Thirteen

I feel so sorry for your family! I wish you could get a glimpse of the great sorrow and grief they are suffering!! Your mother is going downhill and Dad looks pale-faced! Oh how sad! I hope and pray that they will not lose their minds through all this!

—L
ETTER FROM
P
ERRY
M
ILLER
(U
NCLE)

T
hey say a person can't truly know something if they haven't experienced it, or can't acquire perspective if they haven't been on the outside looking in.

Both of these notions would serve me well as I entered the English world and saw for myself that not all English are evil—and not all Amish are good.

Ottie said I was like a sponge, soaking up everything I could about my new life as fast as I could.

“Honey,'' he would say, “slow down. It ain't gonna go nowhere. You've got time to learn.''

But I couldn't be swayed. I had prayed to God, asking that he allow me to keep an open mind about what I would witness on the outside. Confident in his guidance, I became a magnet, drawn to every little detail, thirsting for a knowledge denied for too many years.

I marveled at how friendly everyone was. From Ottie's family, to strangers on the street, to the minister and congregation at our new place of worship—Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

The church was truly something to behold. Families sat together, creating a warmth of spirit absent in Amish services. When the Amish gather for church, the men sit with the men, the women with the women. It is a segregation born of centuries of tradition.

I was also amazed when, at the close of services at the Lutheran church, the Rev. James A. Bettermann hugged every parishioner who walked the greeting line. Such affection and caring I had never seen before in God's house.

Nor had I witnessed another grand religious ceremony of the South. Some Saturday nights between 7:00 and 10:00
P.M
., people would cart lawn chairs to a department store parking lot in Glasgow and settle in for a night of listening to free gospel music performed by local musicians and singers. Marvelous, I thought. Simply marvelous.

I was equally impressed one day when Ottie pulled to the side of the road as a stream of cars with their lights on passed in the other lane.

“Why are you stopping?” I asked.

“Because it's a funeral procession. That's what we do to honor the dead.”

Honor. What a nice word, I thought.

Among the Old Order Amish, such reverence would be unheard of. They believe that when a person dies, there is no sense in paying extended homage to them because they aren't there to witness it. They don't even place flowers on graves.

Beyond the compassionate social customs of my new world, I also reveled in the modern conveniences and entertainment offerings. The electric appliances. The cars. The movies. Television.

I instantly fell in love with washers and dryers, which could not only clean clothes spotless but do it quickly. Back on the farm, we'd have to fire up the gas generator to pump water into the washing machine. And when we dried the clothes, it was on an outdoor line. Washing clothes was such a chore, we usually did it only once a week.

My first movie in a theater,
Dragonheart,
starring Dennis Quaid and Sean Connery, was a bit unsettling, both because we were sitting together in the dark and because the violence of the medieval fantasy was so graphic. I winced with every slash of a sword, every spurt of blood.

In time, though, I grew to enjoy watching movies in theaters—and at home on television. Especially the old Westerns, and especially those featuring John Wayne. They seemed so true, so American, and so full of the right values.

Television and the 1996 Olympics also offered my first chance to hear the National Anthem, and I was at once drawn to its beauty and power, experiencing for the first time a pride in America. The Amish don't play the National Anthem. They don't recite the Pledge of Allegiance, either, feeling perhaps that both overshadow God's importance.

A seemingly more mundane matter—shopping for clothes—took a little more getting used to. I had Faye to help me, but my naïveté overwhelmed her at times. Because we had made all of our clothes on the farm, I was completely oblivious to clothes-buying etiquette when I stepped into a department store for the first time. And the second time, and perhaps the third.

The wonder of it all was that there were so many patterns and colors to choose from. The frustrating thing for Faye was that, despite the broad selection, I initially gravitated to clothes almost as conservative as my Amish attire.

The first time out—I think it was a Sears or a Penney's—I bought a navy blue dress with shiny, satin-like material and a rather plain peach dress. The hems on them weren't much higher than my ankles.

I also got a pair of white tennis shoes and white socks—white, because I was so tired of wearing black.

I didn't try the dresses on to see if they would fit because I felt uncomfortable with the idea of doing so in public. I didn't know about dressing rooms.

Faye, a stout, friendly blonde with a cackle that fills a room, would say, “Go ahead, try it on.”

And I would hold the dress up to me and say, “No, it looks like it will fit me.”

When I finally got the nerve to try a dress on—several shopping trips later—the results were embarrassing. While I was looking at one particular rack of clothes, Faye turned her attention elsewhere. When she looked back, I had put a new dress over the clothes I had worn into the store.

“No, no, honey,” she said, struggling to hold back laughter, “we don't do that.”

“But if it fits over my clothes, it should fit me just fine,” I protested innocently.

“Sweetheart, we have dressing rooms for that.”

Faye would later say she had to leave the store briefly, go to the van, and compose herself. I guess Ottie and Faye had a good chuckle.

Another time, having mastered dressing rooms but still short on protocol, I wore a new dress to the checkout line and paid for it, showing a surprised cashier the tags hanging from the sleeves.

Fortunately, things got better over time. I graduated from modest clothing to attire with more pizzazz, although once I'd found a pattern I liked, I wanted to buy it in all the colors it came in. Kind of like a man buying dress shirts or slacks. One pattern, one maker, every color.

I also began buying touches of makeup, perfume, and facial cream, things I had avoided early on because I thought such aesthetics silly and a waste of money.

“Facial cream,” Faye said in her sultry Southern drawl, “helps stall the aging process.”

“Maybe Ottie doesn't want me to have it,” I quipped. “Maybe he'll want me to age.”

“I don't think so, honey,” she said.

She was right, of course. Ottie does like a little dab of feminine allure. Even in clothes, I learned.

Shortly before Christmas, six months removed from the Amish, Faye suggested on a shopping trip to Nashville that we stop at Victoria's Secret. Ottie, she said, would be most appreciative if I bought some sexy lingerie as an early Christmas present. And so I did. Nervously, but knowing full well he would be the only one to see it on me.

That night, after we got home, I went into the bathroom, put on the red-and-white lace teddy, black garters, white gloves, and red feather boa I had bought and, feeling more than a little silly, strode awkwardly to the side of our bed.

I could tell by the smile on Ottie's face that he was pleased, that I looked rather fetching.

“That's a memory I'll take with me, that's for sure,” he would say later, grinning mischievously.