Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [36]
Life on the ranch had gotten increasingly interesting. While I was perfectly comfortable herding cattle, tending sick cows, and mending fences, I clearly had a lot to learn when it came to socializing.
* * *
Meanwhile, back in Bloomfield, my buddies were continuing in their wild and wicked ways. They called me sometimes, usually on a Sunday morning. Back then, it cost much less to call on Sundays, so that’s when they contacted me. They filled me in on the latest, and after a time, I began to feel a tinge of homesickness. I missed them. And I missed my family. But not enough to lure me back.
After I gave Rachel my mailing address, the letters started flowing in—from Mom and, of course, from Dad. Mom wrote from a broken heart. Told me she missed me and wanted me to come home. Dad wrote masterfully, laying on every guilt trip he could devise. Of course they weren’t perfect as parents, he wrote. But they did the best they knew. He had hoped his sons would be happy and settled in Bloomfield. Now I had left, and that was a big disappointment to him and Mom.
And always, he waxed poetic about my spiritual state. I had chosen a path of wickedness. What if I were killed in an accident? Where would I go? How would I fare when I faced the judgment seat? And so on and so on.
I believed that what he said was true—that I had left the protection of the Amish fold and was as good as lost. That there was no hope for me, should I die. That there would never be any chance of salvation outside the Amish church.
That’s what he wrote, and that’s what I believed. The fires of hell awaited me. That was a fact I never even tried to dispute. But despite that knowledge, I had chosen to leave. And despite that heavy mental burden, I really did not want to return.
My father knew how to write in a way that always cast a cloud of gloom, even on the sunniest day. But I tried hard to shake it off.
I rarely, if ever, wrote back.
Then one Sunday morning, while I was enjoying a rare hour of sleeping in, Gary clattered into the bunkhouse, hollering for me. There was a phone call for me back at the house. I stumbled from the bed, bleary eyed, and got dressed. Gary said the caller would call back in fifteen minutes, so we drove to the house, and I waited. Then the phone rang. It was Vern Herschberger, one of the gang of six in Bloomfield. He had left home early that morning and was at the bus station in Ottumwa. He was heading out to join me.
He arrived the next day, and instantly landed a job at a neighboring ranch about six miles away. A few weeks later, Mervin Gingerich and my best friend, Marvin Yutzy, arrived. By now, the Amish boys from Bloomfield were causing quite a stir among the local ranchers. Gary made his rounds and bragged loudly about how hard we could work. They all wanted a piece of us. Mervin and Marvin landed jobs the day they stepped off the bus. A week or two after that, the last of the six—Willis Herschberger and Rudy Yutzy—arrived. And just like that, there we all were—all six of us—in a radius of about twenty miles, working as cowboys in the sand hills south of Valentine, Nebraska.
It had been a month or two since I’d seen any of them, and I was thrilled to talk to them and hear the news from Bloomfield. As it turned out, things were about as bad as they’d been when I left—maybe even worse.
Our exodus caused a huge uproar in Bloomfield. Five families were affected. Five families left in shock, absorbing the sudden loss, the abrupt disappearance of certain sons. Five sets of parents, including Bishop George, whose son Mervin had left with his buddies. Tongues wagged. The community staggered from the shock and the shame of losing so many of its young sons to the world.
And people in the older communities from which the Bloomfield families had emigrated sadly and dramatically