MEN OF LANCASTER COUNTY 01: The Amish Groom Read online

  His final task of the day was to mount a new set of tires on a courting buggy. As he did that, I worked in the space next to his, adding extra suspension to the rear axle of a new top wagon. Daadi slid the first tire on the back axle and then pulled out a wrench and began tightening the nuts. Glancing his way, I could almost feel God whispering over my shoulder.

  This is the time you prayed for.

  Pausing in my work, I cleared my throat. “Daadi, I need to talk to you for a minute.”

  “Oh?” He looked relaxed and unfazed, his eyes on the task at hand.

  “I’m struggling with something, and I don’t even know how to put it into words.”

  He stopped turning the wrench and gave me his full attention. “Have you done something you regret, son?”

  “No. No, it’s nothing like that.”

  He began to turn the wrench again, perhaps sensing it would be easier for me if we kept working while I stumbled through what I needed to say. “Tell me what’s on your mind.”

  And so I told him, as near as I could, what I had admitted to Rachel and Jake, what I had been sensing lately when I went to the pond on early mornings, and how I had begun to feel that God Himself was beckoning me from beyond Lancaster County—though for whatever reason I couldn’t imagine. Daadi continued to mount the tires as I talked, pausing now and then as I spoke but saying nothing.

  As soon as I was done, I felt a crushing weight, not a lifted burden. Despite what Jake had said about my situation being different from my mother’s, I knew this conversation had to be nearly as hurtful to Daadi as when she ran away from the Amish life almost twenty-five years before.

  “I’m sorry if this is hard for you to hear,” I concluded. “It’s hard for me to say. But it’s been even harder to keep locked up inside me. I had to tell you.”

  “Yes, you did.” Daadi set the wrench down. “And I’m glad you did, Tyler.”

  “I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to be anywhere else but here, but I can’t ignore this restlessness inside me.”

  He nodded. I could tell he was thinking. Maybe praying. Trying to form the right response.

  “Rachel thinks this has to do with my dad and the fact that he essentially abandoned me here all those years ago,” I added.

  “Hmm,” Daadi said, but nothing else. He was deep in thought.

  “But I forgave him for that. It’s not like I lie awake wondering why he didn’t want me. I’ve been happy here. You and Mammi and Jake and the aunts and uncles—you’re my family. And I had my chance to go back with my father.”

  “Yes, you did. A long time ago.”

  “But I’ve never regretted staying, Daadi. Not once. This is my home. This is my life.”

  “And yet you have not gone to the bishop to seek your vows of membership.”

  I opened my mouth and then shut it again. What could I say to that? My mind spinning, I returned to my own work. Outside in the work bay, I could hear various strains of conversation as one by one the other workers called it a day and began to head home. Inside, Daadi and I were quiet save for the clink and clank of our tools, both of us lost in contemplation.

  Finally, I turned to my beloved grandfather and said, “It can’t really be God calling me from outside, can it?”

  He tightened a bolt. “God is everywhere. You know this, Tyler. If He can call Father Abraham out, He can call you.”

  “Yes, but why would He? What is out there that is better than what I have here?”

  Daadi finished putting on the tire, and then he went over to the bench behind us, sat down, and patted the seat next to him. I set my screwdriver aside and joined him there.

  “Your life is not one to be spent in pursuit of what is better or best. Your life is to be spent in surrender, Tyler. Surrender and service to God.”

  “But I am to be separate,” I countered, hearing the words of the Ordnung in my head.

  “You are to be obedient.”

  Another span of seconds passed. I let my gaze travel around the shop, taking in the familiar tools and products of the trade. Over near the window, the late afternoon sunshine splayed across the sewing area, where the upholstery was made. Beyond that, in the painting bay, sat the half shell of a new spring wagon, ready for its electrical work to be started as soon as the final coat was dry.

  I sucked in a deep breath, relishing the buggy shop’s familiar scent of oil and paint and new fabric and metal and fresh-cut wood. The work here could be tedious at times, but I loved it just the same. Why would I ever want to turn my back on this?

  Then it came to me. What if God was just testing me? What if He was allowing me to feel the lure of the world outside so that I could firmly renounce it? What if I had only to state my intentions, fulfill the class requirements, bow my head in baptism, and make my vows to prove I could forsake that which I had been born into?

  My heart raced. If that were the case, then maybe I really could silence forever this beckoning voice that confused me. I could train myself to see only the Amish Tyler when I gazed into the pond. I could marry Rachel and be done with wondering.

  If this was a test, I was ready to pass it.

  Eyes wide, I turned to Daadi and spoke, surprising both myself and him with the urgency in my tone. “I want to be obedient. I want to become a member.”

  Daadi nodded slowly, but his mind was far away.

  “Did you hear what I said, Daadi? I want to become a member.”

  My grandfather placed a hand on my arm. “I heard you, Tyler,” he said, his voice heavy. “We shall pray about this. And I will speak to the bishop.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Here I was finally saying the words he’d longed for, and he was putting me off?

  “You don’t think I should take my vows?” My voice sounded harsh, demanding, even in my own ears.

  He was quiet for a long moment.

  “Vows are never for the purpose of silencing what you don’t want to hear.” He stood, moved slowly to the tool rack, and set the wrench in its place. “But I will pray. And I will consult the bishop.”

  With that, he turned and walked out of the shop, leaving me alone with my thoughts, even more confused now than I had been before.

  SIX

  The days following were strange for me. Morning chores without Jake took longer, and his empty place beside me in the buggy shop was keenly felt. Worse, more than once I caught my grandparents staring at me in concern when they thought I wouldn’t notice.

  Daadi had obviously confided in Mammi about our conversation because I could see that she knew and it was bothering her. The fact that he’d shared it with her didn’t surprise or annoy me. I wanted her to know, but I also didn’t want her to worry. And it was obvious to me she was worried, even though she never brought it up.

  At least I was doing this honorably, I told myself, thinking of how my mother had simply packed her things and left in the dark of night without a word to anyone. I didn’t remember her being unkind or uncaring. I felt certain she left the way she did because she didn’t want a tearful scene peppered by harsh words everyone would regret having said. Such a departure would have been easier for me too, but I refused to repeat the past that way.

  It wasn’t just that I knew well the pain such an action would cause. It was also a matter of age and maturity. I was in my twenties, but at the time my mother left the farm for Philadelphia, she’d been all of eighteen and far less experienced with the world than I. She did not have another home and family on the outside where she could visit each summer and try the Englisch life on for size.

  My aunt Sarah had been closer to my mother than anyone, and I had asked her once why she thought my mother left. I was twelve and wanting to know more than the little my grandparents had told me, but I hadn’t felt comfortable asking them about it.

  “I’ve never understood why,” Sarah had responded, and it was obvious not knowing still pained her. “Perhaps she just wanted things the Amish life didn’t give her. Fancy things. She liked the
city and dancing and television and movies and riding in cars. I guess it reached the point where the Plain life just wasn’t enough for her.”

  “Enough for her,” I echoed.

  She nodded. “Jonah believes so as well. We were all good friends back then, you know, and I think he saw the situation even more clearly than I did. He tried mightily to comfort me in those early days after she left. He kept reminding me of all the times she would push for more even as I would insist on holding back. My sister and I were the best of friends, but there was a wild streak in her that I never had—not wild like bad, just wild as in she couldn’t be tamed. She had too much energy. Too much curiosity. Too much desire for the things of this world.”

  I had accepted Sarah’s explanation then, but now that I looked back, I had to wonder if there had been more to it than that. Could it have been a crisis of faith that drove my mother away? A need to seek something in the broader world? A tugging from outside that she, too, had attributed to God?

  Sadly, there was no way I could ever know.

  What I did know were the basic facts that my father had told me over the years, how she left her family’s farm in Lancaster County in the middle of the night and caught a bus to Philadelphia. How she moved into a tiny apartment there and took a job as a waitress. How not long after that, my dad just happened to go into the restaurant where she worked, spotted her behind the counter, and fell in love.

  He’d been a first lieutenant back then, on leave before heading oversees to an army base in Heidelburg, Germany. He had come to Philadelphia to visit with his old West Point roommate and best buddy, and when the two of them came into the restaurant that night, they both flirted with the pretty girl working the counter. She flirted back only with my father, however, as if it had been love at first sight on her side too. At the end of the evening, half joking, he had asked her if she’d like to come to Maryland and take a ride in his ’67 Charger convertible. To his surprise and delight, she had said yes. And she hadn’t been half joking.

  Three weeks later—and just a month before his deployment to Germany—they had driven down to Maryland to tie the knot and spent their honeymoon at the Jersey Shore. At some point fairly soon after that, they went to Lancaster County to tell her family about their marriage—and their upcoming move—in person.

  I knew that was one of the few times my dad had ever been to the farm. And I also knew the visit hadn’t gone well. Years ago, I had asked Sarah if she remembered that day, and she’d nodded as a heavy sadness fell across her face.

  “That was the last time any of us saw her. She was so happy, and she wanted all of us to be happy for her too, but how could we? First, she ran away without a word. Then when she finally came back it was to announce that not only was she married—to an Englischer—but that her husband was in the military—and that they were bound for Germany for three years. I think it was just too much for my parents to take in all at once. Too much for all of us. I was so upset I couldn’t even talk to her.”

  “Did any of you stay in touch? Maybe write to her over there?”

  She shook her head sadly. “In the beginning she didn’t send us an address, Tyler. I think she needed some space.”

  I nodded, knowing the fault was hers, not theirs.

  “I think she wrote Mamm once, and then we didn’t hear from her again until after you were born. One day out of the blue she called the buggy shop from the Philly airport, saying that she and her husband had a child now and that the three of you were back in the States while he attended some special training or something in Maryland.”

  “Maryland? That’s not far. Did they come out for another visit?”

  “No.”

  “So did any of you go down to see her—see us—in Maryland?” I was careful not to sound accusatory.

  “No.” Sarah grew quiet for a long moment. “But I think Mamm and Daed would have done things differently if they had realized what was going to happen. I know I would have.”

  I could see the truth of that statement in her eyes. I could also see the infinite pain behind it.

  “Only God knows the future, Tyler. Sometimes you learn how to handle things by making mistakes the first time around.”

  That Sunday, the worship service was held at Rachel’s farm, and though I was glad to see her, she and I did not speak of what I had mentioned at the wedding. Not directly, anyway. Chatting after lunch, she asked me about Jake—if we had heard from him and how he was liking farrier school so far—but there was a veiled concern there, as if her question really didn’t have much to do with his absence at all. We were surrounded by other people, so I wasn’t free to tell her that I had talked to both Jake and Daadi about what I was wrestling with, and that Daadi would be asking the bishop what I should do. I could only tell her that Jake had left a message on the buggy shop phone, assuring us he had arrived safely in Missouri, and that I missed him but appreciated not having to fight him for the last pork chop at dinner.

  Back home that afternoon, as I put away the buggy and began to brush down my horse, Daadi joined me in the stable. I could tell something was on his mind.

  “I spoke to the bishop,” he said, taking the harness from me and hanging it on its hook.

  “Yes?” My heart was pounding, but I focused on running the brush over the mare’s brown flank.

  “He feels as I do, Tyler. We will join you in praying for wisdom and clarity for you to hear from God. If He is speaking to you, you must listen.”

  “But how will I know if this is actually God speaking to me or if it’s just my own thoughts made to seem that way?”

  “Discernment is a discipline. That is why you must fast and pray and ask God to show you His way. Bishop Ott is praying for you even now. As am I. And your grandmother. We are already praying for you to hear from God. Like the prophets of old, if you ask Him for wisdom, He will answer with wisdom.”

  I didn’t doubt for a moment that Bishop Ott’s counsel was wise, but I didn’t know what that meant for the here and now. “And what do I do in the meantime?”

  My grandfather reached out a strong arm to touch my shoulder. “That is all you do, Tyler. You pray and ask for wisdom. Do not rest until you have it.”

  I spent the following week in a concerted effort to hear from God—fasting for the first twenty-four hours, rising each day earlier than usual to pray on my knees at my bedside, returning again and again to the quiet of the pond because that was where I first felt that flickering summons of unrest.

  Mammi still said nothing to me about what we were all quietly praying for, though several times that week she reached out her hand to touch my face or my arm when she served me at the table, and her eyes spoke encouragement mixed with apprehension.

  During the day, I kept my mind on the work I had at the buggy shop. We had a new hydraulic brake we were putting into all of our buggies, and I had a week’s worth of retrofits to keep my hands busy while I listened for an answer from God.

  By that Friday, I was getting weary of the diligence this sort of prayer required. I knew God did not always answer prayers in a swift manner, but I felt a growing sense of urgency as the week ended. Everything that related to the rest of my life—baptism, church membership, marriage to Rachel—hinged on God’s answers to these prayers.

  On Sunday morning, I woke well before the sun. It was not a worship Sunday, so I crept downstairs, grabbed my jacket, and quietly opened the mudroom door. I could feel the change in the air the moment I stepped outside. It was early yet for snow, but overnight a heavy frost had fallen, and I was greeted by a rousing chill. My breath came out in puffy clouds as I whistled softly for Timber.

  Once he joined me, we walked across the pasture to the windmill and then took the well-worn path down to the pond, icy grass crunching under my boots. The surface of the water was lightly frozen around the edges, and I was tempted to break the thin layer of ice so that I could see my reflection, so I could search for the me on the other side. I didn’t, though. Somehow i
t didn’t seem right to disturb what the finger of God had done overnight.

  As Timber made his usual sniffing tour of the shoreline, I knelt there at the bank, closed my eyes, and prayed with renewed vigor.

  Lord, You know all things. You know what has been keeping me awake at night and dropping me to my knees in the morning. I don’t want to feel restless and unsettled anymore. I humbly ask that You would reveal to me whether You are testing me or tugging me. Show me what to do. Show me…

  I stayed there until after the sun rose, long after Timber had trotted back to the house. My limbs were stiff and cold when I finally stood and left the pond, but my vision was no clearer than it had been when I had arrived. Back at the stables, after I fed a hungry dog and tended to the horses, the morning passed slowly. I shared a quiet breakfast with my grandparents but otherwise kept to myself. No answer came the rest of that day, or the next few days after that.

  It wasn’t until the following Thursday, in fact, that my answer seemed to come. I was in the buggy shop finishing up a brake job when the phone rang. My cousin Harley answered it.

  “It’s for you, Ty,” he said after a moment, turning toward me.

  I put down my tools and took the receiver from him, a bit puzzled. The phone was primarily for staying in contact with our suppliers on the outside. I hardly ever used it and wasn’t expecting a call from anyone.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, Tyler.”

  The voice on the other end of the line was my father’s.

  SEVEN

  It took me a few moments to grasp the notion that my dad had called me on an ordinary Thursday in October. We usually only talked to each other on special occasions, never just to chat. In fact, the last time we’d spoken had been when he’d called me on my birthday, seven months earlier.

  My first thought was that something terrible had happened, but his voice didn’t sound upset.

  “Dad, how are you?” I asked, the only question I could think of as I moved away from the noise of the shop’s interior and closer to the outside door.