Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [13]
Back at the east school, I was a big fish in a little pond. A tough third grader—a leader. But in fourth grade I was a tiny tadpole in a vast ocean. A nobody. A scrawny little kid to be kicked around.
And kicked around I was. But I deserved it. I didn’t know my place. My big mouth was part of the problem. That, and my stubborn nature, which I had inherited from my father.
I wouldn’t give in, but instead, fought my tormentors. Of course, I was instantly overwhelmed every time. It was pretty bad. One evening on the way home from school, a big eighth grader sat me down in a mud puddle on the road because I refused to retract a derogatory taunt I had foolishly hurled at him.
I wouldn’t call them bullies, necessarily, the guys who tormented me. To them, I was just a smart-aleck kid who needed to be shown his place in the order of things.
Still, that fourth-grade year was the worst of my eight years at Amish schools. I hated it with a passion.
But it could have been worse. A lot worse, for a lot longer. As it was for another Aylmer Amish boy: Nicholas Herrfort.
Almost every Amish community has that unusual, or odd, family, as do most English communities, I suspect. They dress differently. Talk differently. Act differently. In Aylmer, that family was the Herrforts.
Solomon Herrfort had moved to Aylmer as a single man. He emerged from the backwater area of the plain and very conservative Milverton, Ontario, community. He worked for a time as a hired hand for my uncle, Bishop Peter Yoder. Later, he married Esther Gascho, and they settled on a small farm a few miles northwest of our home.
Solomon was different, no question about it. He was small, lean, and wiry, with a shock of unruly orange hair and a stringy, dirty-orange beard. He was a bit slow and eccentric and hard of hearing. His typical response to any comment was a prolonged “Ooohhh,” probably because he couldn’t hear what was said to him. We children made fun of him and said he had wax in his ears.
A grove of tall trees obscured the dull brick house on his farm at all times, even on the sunniest day. The house itself was spooky, with many sharply peaked gables. It was always gloomy after dark; the only light was the pale, flickering glow of the dismal little kerosene flame lamps the family used in their home.
The Herrforts never took a turn holding church services in their home like other families, and they rarely socialized with other families in the evenings. Solomon didn’t like to be on the road with horse and buggy after dark. The family was as close to reclusive as any I’ve ever known.
They were also poor. Really poor. What Solomon did for a living remains a mystery to me. I suppose he farmed a bit and had some goats. I don’t know what the family ate. Whatever it was, it wasn’t much, and it probably wasn’t healthy.
Esther was always frail and in poor health and could never seem to get her housework done. My sisters recall being sent over to help Esther clean her house. The Aylmer families took turns, helping her out as needed. Every time a new baby was born to the Herrforts, the neighbors swarmed in and scrubbed the house top to bottom while Esther was at the hospital.
Solomon and Esther had six or seven children. They all wore ill-fitting, ill-made clothes, and they always looked thin, pale, and sickly.
Children of any age and in any culture are pitiless and cruel and run in packs. And heaven help the ones rejected by the pack. The Herrfort children were taunted and tormented as heartlessly as any I have ever witnessed.
Nicholas, the oldest, was born in 1963, sixteen months behind me. He always seemed much younger because he didn’t start school until he was seven; almost all the children from other families started at age six. Nicholas was small for his age and always dressed in thin, shabby clothes and worn-out shoes some other family had given him. His front three teeth were missing,