Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [10]
His face fell. The smile vanished. His eyes widened with dismay and pain. He seemed to shrink into himself. Without a word, he turned and lumbered away.
I walked off. Didn’t really think anything more about it. I didn’t despise him. Or laugh at him. He was just different. He was, well, fat.
That afternoon, after we had returned home, my sisters talked of the strangers from Nappanee. And of the little boy. Ernest.
“Did you play with him?” one of them asked. Probably Maggie. She was always admonishing us to be nice.
“A little,” I answered innocently. “He was fat.”
Maggie looked sharply at me, startled and suspicious.
Utterly unaware of the effect my words would have, I blithely prattled on. “He was fat. I told him he was fat.” It was a huge mistake.
My three sisters reacted with expressions of great horror and disbelief.
“You did what?” they shrieked, practically in unison. And right there, on the spot, an impromptu school session was called to order.
Three screeching teachers. One poor, unwilling little four-year-old student.
The tumultuous clamor of their voices echoed through the house in loud, overwhelming waves. I wished they would stop before they woke Dad from his nap. That wouldn’t be good for anyone. I stood there, perplexed. I honestly wasn’t sure what all the fuss was about.
“You can’t do that, make fun of someone because of how he looks,” Naomi lectured sternly. “It’s not kind.”
Kind? What did that have to do with anything? Truth was truth. Unwilling to concede without making a defense, I bristled.
“But he was fat,” I said stoutly.
Alas, my rock-solid reasoning was promptly smashed and swept aside like so much dust. My retort triggered a cascade of even more anguished screeching. Many ominous scenarios were trotted out. What if people made fun of the way you look? laughed at your curly hair? How would you like that?
Although failing to see any connection between my hair and my apparently unforgivable sin, I nonetheless made a hasty tactical decision to not say anything more.
Shut up and retreat.
The screeching eventually subsided. Soundly admonished and feeling very chastised, I was released at last. Relieved, I dashed off to play.
My sisters’ lecturing must have sunk in somewhat. I’m sure I committed countless childish transgressions in the ensuing years. But none even remotely approached the level of my stark, pure cruelty to a poor, overweight boy named Ernest on a long-ago summer Sunday afternoon in Aylmer.
5
I wanted to go.
I yearned to go.
But I was too little, they said. And too young.
“Wait a few years. Your time will come soon enough.”
And so, I watched my brothers leave, one at a time.
Each morning they walked out of the house, swinging their lunch pails beside them. They returned each afternoon around three thirty and told me about their day—all the things they had seen and learned. And of the books they’d read.
“When you turn six,” my mother told me. “Then you can go.”
Days passed.
Then weeks.
Then months.
And then one August, the big day arrived—my sixth birthday. Now I was old enough. And big enough. Finally, I could go to school.
I’ll never forget my first day. I left the house with my brothers and trudged importantly down the road, clutching my pencils and a ruler. Swinging my new blue-green lunch box, I strode bravely up the cracked and ancient concrete walkway and up the steps into the big white schoolhouse.
Many of my classmates had already arrived and were milling about. Harold Stoll. Jerry Eicher. Willis Stoll. Abraham Marner. Lydia Wagler (my first cousin). And Lois Gascho.
We stood around, wide eyed in awe. A few looked as if they might cry. The second and third graders marched about, casting condescending glances at the little first-grade rookies.
I both liked and feared our teacher, Miss Eicher. Like most teachers, she had her favorites. I wasn’t one of them.
I did have some small advantages, though. I knew my ABCs. I’d learned them at home from my older siblings. I could already read a bit from the tattered remnants of Dick and