Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [15]
In 1994, the Herrfort family moved to Bland, Virginia. What drew them there I do not know. It was a poor, remote community. Of Nicholas’s life at this time, I have few details. Some say that after the move to Virginia, he stopped taking medication for his mental problems. Whatever the facts, I do know that his mental condition deteriorated steadily.
In June 1996, Nicholas’s parents decided Nicholas would be better off living with relatives in Aylmer, as he was becoming a bit too much for the family to handle in Virginia.
Nicholas was vehemently opposed to the plan. He did not want to leave Virginia, but his parents insisted. At four thirty on the morning they planned to leave, Nicholas got up and left the house. After the sun rose, he was nowhere to be found.
His family searched and searched. And called and called his name. There was no answer. Sometime around midday, they found him. Lying facedown in a shallow pond just sixteen inches deep. He had taken his own life by drowning. By the time his body was found, the turtles had already eaten away part of his face.
No one can know the depths of his mother’s raw and bitter sorrow for her oldest son, her firstborn. I do know, however, that I couldn’t stop thinking about Nicholas and all that he had endured. Rather than being accepted and treated as an equal among his peers, he had been rejected and ridiculed simply for being different. My heart ached with regret, wondering how his life might have been different if just one of us had cared enough to be his friend.
They buried Nicholas in a remote country graveyard in Pearisburg, Virginia. A busload of relatives from Aylmer attended the funeral. A simple wooden marker was erected above his grave.
I thought about the shy, stammering, smiling boy who laughed and chattered as we walked along the road in the afternoon sunlight on the way home from school. And then I thought about the cruel injustices inflicted on him by those who should have known better and should have protected such a weak and defenseless child.
We knew who we were. And we know who we are today. We can mourn and grieve our thoughtless and cruel actions. We can say we were just children. We can say we didn’t mean it. We can even ask forgiveness from the Herrfort family and from God.
But not from Nicholas. Not ever from Nicholas.
7
My father was a man of many gifts and skills.
Farming was not one of them.
He dutifully tilled the earth and planted the seeds each year, and they produced. But his heart was not in such work. And it showed about the farm. Fences in a state of semi-repair, rusting skeletal hulks of old junk machinery parked about, willy-nilly, in the field just south of the barn. We didn’t realize it then, but our farm was just plain trashy.
That’s not saying my father was a lazy man or that he didn’t provide for his family. Far from it. Dad was a born salesman who loved the art of the deal. He sold nursery stock, fresh produce, and raised and sold purebred Landrace hogs.
Dad was also a gifted dowser, or “water witch”—although he stridently rejected that label. Dowsing has always had a bit of a shady reputation. During the Middle Ages, it was even believed to be from the devil.
It has never been scientifically proven to work, and most people today still view it with suspicion, fear, and skepticism. But growing up, I saw it with my own eyes, many times. If there was water to be found below the ground, not only could my dad locate it, but he could even tell you where to drill for the best flow and the clearest water. His record for accuracy was 100 percent.
Chuck Norman was the local well driller. He was known to everyone as simply “Fine and Dandy,” because that was his automatic response to most questions. He used the phrase to answer anything from a question about how he was feeling to a comment about the weather.
Tall, wiry, and toothless, he was always dressed in stained olive-green coveralls and wore a dented, dirty, yellow hard hat, his ever-present