Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [31]
If he did—he was wrong.
Tensions flared and faded between us, as confrontation after confrontation surged and subsided. The mental strain escalated to an almost unbearable level.
13
Gary Simmons, a squat, chunky young man dressed in western clothes, a wide-brimmed cowboy hat, and boots with spurs, showed up unannounced at our farm one day with Trader Don, the local horse dealer. Don introduced him to us as Gary Simmons, a rancher, in the area looking to buy some horses.
Gary shook hands with a firm grip and looked you in the eye. He spoke with a distinct western accent and had a great booming laugh. His pretty, young wife, Joyce, stuck close to his side and smiled.
Dad didn’t really have any suitable horses to sell, that much was decided in about two minutes. Our horses were a pretty raggedy bunch. Don and Gary hung around and chatted. Eventually Dad drifted away, back to the office and his typewriter, where he was pounding out his next article for Family Life. Soon, I was the only one standing there talking to Don and Gary. Turns out Gary hailed from Valentine, Nebraska, and managed a ranch there.
I asked him about it. How big was the ranch?
Fifteen thousand acres, he said. He ran the ranch for a group of cattle investors from Kansas.
Wow. Fifteen thousand acres. The number boggled my mind.
Then, quietly, out of Trader Don’s hearing, I asked, “Do you ever have any use for some good help out there?” I don’t know why I asked, but I did. I didn’t really have any plans or anything.
Gary chuckled. “Oh, you bet,” he answered. “If you ever need a job, call me. We always have an opening for good help. We can always use another good hand.”
Soon after that, they left. I mulled over what he had said about needing good help. Maybe, just maybe, one day I would call him.
It’s not that I particularly liked horses or considered myself a horseman. But like most teenagers, I had often dreamed of being a real cowboy. I’d seen the pictures, read the Westerns—stories by Louis L’Amour. Zane Grey. Max Brand. Before, it had always been a minor dream, but now a doorway had cracked open. It might not be a bad experience, to head out west and work on a ranch.
The idea, and the beginnings of a plan, had been planted.
One evening about six months later, from the phone at the local Amish schoolhouse, I called Gary Simmons at his ranch.
* * *
Somehow I slept, though fitfully, waking now and again to glance at the tiny alarm clock beside my bed. The entire house slumbered in silence.
I dozed off for a time and then jolted awake again. The little fluorescent hands on the alarm clock glowed eerily. Two o’clock. One last time, I slid my hand beneath my pillow and felt for the note. It was still there, exactly where I’d placed it last night after scribbling it on a scrap of paper the day before and where my father would find it at dawn.
Quietly, slowly, so as not to wake my brothers, I shifted in the bed, lifted the covers, and stepped onto the cool concrete floor. I felt my way through the pitch-black darkness to the door, opened it, and slipped out of the bedroom.
I took a few quick, quiet steps to the left, into the furnace room, which housed my father’s great brick-and-steel contraption of a homemade wood-burning stove. Dug around in the large lidded wooden box where Mom stored her winter blankets. Located the little black duffel bag I’d packed the day before, lifted it out, and set it on the floor.
Then I slipped into the clothes I had hidden away—a plain, old green shirt and a newer pair of denim barn-door pants. No galluses. Where I was going, I wouldn’t need them. I laced my feet into a pair of tough leather work boots and then picked up the duffel bag. I was ready.
Upstairs, on the main floor of the house, my parents slept, unaware. With a keen ear for any unusual sounds, I walked softly to the door, gently turned the knob, and pulled it open,