Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [12]
I stood hunched and silent, guilty before them all.
Then Miss Eicher abruptly got up, rang the second bell, and afternoon classes resumed.
That was it.
She did not spank me, or even tell my parents (as far as I knew). But she did make me stay inside at recess and during lunch hour and finish every single abominable writing exercise I had avoided.
It took several days.
After I had laboriously completed the last dreadful assignment, she released me to join my classmates, and I ran outside gratefully.
It was never mentioned again.
Nor was it forgotten.
While I might have struggled with the tediousness of writing drills, it was the bigger questions in life that really held my attention—even at such a young age.
Twice a month, on Friday afternoons, we had art class, which consisted of the students’ drawing simple things like birds and a sun with cascading beams in the upper corner and short slogans like “God Is Love” or “Love” at the bottom.
One day at recess my friends Willis, Jerry, and Philip and I stood examining the art displayed on the wall and trying to guess who drew what. One drawing had the usual “Love” slogan at the bottom.
We stood there with our hands in our barn-door pants pockets, or with thumbs hooked on our galluses—as we’d seen our fathers do at church—and discussed whether we really should love everyone. Even our enemies.
We agreed we should.
“But what about Satan?” Philip asked. “Should we love him, too?”
We respected Philip. He was a year older and a grade above us. Next year he would graduate to the west school where the big students went.
It was a startling thought. We grappled with the disturbing concept. Satan was wicked; that we knew from countless sermons. He’d tempted Eve in the Garden and even now lurked about trying to get little children to do bad things.
But weren’t we supposed to love everyone? Even him? We could not imagine that we should hate anything or anyone.
“Satan is bad. We shouldn’t love him,” I said tentatively. But I was unsure of my words.
In the next few minutes, the four of us hashed it out with serious observations and solemn comments, balancing the sin of loving evil against the sin of not loving at all.
We finally reached a consensus and agreed that perhaps we were obligated to love Satan just a little bit. Not much. Just enough so we wouldn’t hate him, because hating was wrong.
Satisfied, we disbanded as the bell rang and returned to our desks.
We told no one of our conclusion. But I pondered the issue in my heart for months.
6
Soon after school began came the first frosts of fall.
As autumn descended on the farm, row upon row of whispering green cornstalks faded slowly to a greenish brown. Neighbors gathered and helped one another as teams and wagons plodded through the fields and returned laden with long, heavy bundles of cornstalks flowing over the sides and dragging on the ground.
The corn bundles were then thrown into the ravenous chopper, where they were shredded to bits before being propelled up the long pipes into the silo until it was bulging to the brim. The air reeked with the wet, pungent odor of fresh chopped cornstalks.
And every year Mom warned us all with terrifying tales of the awful things that could happen if one didn’t respect the chopper and got too close.
My personal favorite was the classic tale of the little four-year-old boy from somewhere, sometime, who disappeared one fall without a trace. Right at silo-filling time, of course. He had wandered too close and fallen in when they were filling the silo and the chopper had devoured him. Nothing was seen of him again until the next winter, when they were throwing down silage to feed the cows. They found his chopped-up remains, in tiny bits, mixed in with the silage. We listened, wide eyed and appalled. I don’t know if the story was actually true.
We all watched ourselves around the chopper nevertheless. No sense becoming a cautionary tale for future generations.
* * *
In the fall of 1970, I entered the fourth grade at the west school,