Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [43]
We had no bags, no extra clothes, nothing. By the seat of our pants, and with no forethought, we were leaving home.
We sent no word to our families to let them know our plans or where we were. That was the cruelest part of that black and wicked day. Back home, as the afternoon began inching into evening, I’m sure the folks became increasingly restless and worried. Eli and I had our reputations; our families probably had no doubt that we were involved in some sort of mischief. Years later, my father told me how frantic and worried they were when we didn’t show up. His voice heavy with emotion, he spoke of how his younger sister, Eli’s mom, stood in the rain at the end of the walks and peered into the darkness. To the south, out our long lane toward the road, she strained and looked and called her son’s name. There was no answer. Only the mocking sound of rain and the wind slashing through the trees. And intermittent silence.
Eventually she gave up and straggled back into the house, soaked and chilled to the bone. No one ate supper that night. And sleep was far away and fleeting—a hopeless thing—as the two families, Eli’s and mine, sat there and wondered if they’d ever see us alive again.
At the motel, twenty-five miles south of our worried, frantic families, we slept soundly. The next morning dawned, a nice clear day. The roads were good. But our green machine wouldn’t start. Dead battery. The smarmy salesman had taken us. After purchasing a new battery at a nearby garage, we headed south again, down Route 63, with not a care in the world, except that we were running low on funds.
We reached Eli’s home turf late that afternoon. Still no plan for how we would survive or where we would live.
We scrabbled some odd jobs here and there for money on which to live. Eli claimed to own some calves on his father’s farm, and at night, we would sneak in and grab a few from the pasture, tie them up, place them in the trunk of the old green Dodge, and sell them to a local English farmer. Technically, of course, the calves didn’t really belong to Eli, but to his dad. I knew it and he knew it. But we took them anyway, and sold them. We were flat out stealing. Each time, the money kept us going for a few more days.
The news flashed three hundred miles back to Bloomfield about what the wicked boys were up to these days. (Or down to.) People clucked their tongues and shook their heads, and wondered aloud if we’d land in jail.
We never found a fixed place to stay in Marshfield. Instead, we slept in seedy hotels, and sometimes in the car. But we hadn’t quite reached our low point—yet.
After a few weeks, we decided to head back to Bloomfield in search of greener pastures. I’m not sure what we wanted there or why we went. I guess I just longed for my old stomping grounds. I missed my friends and wondered how they were. Eli and I were pretty much social outcasts. Outlaws. Drifters. With only each other for support. And that got a little tricky, in our heads. We argued and fussed sometimes. The stress of our situation went far deeper and affected us far more than either of us could possibly recognize or comprehend.
We needed to hear words of affirmation. Words that would never come from anyone in our families. But we might hear them from my friends back in Bloomfield. And so, lonely and longing for something we did not have and could not find, we returned.
Back in Bloomfield, we skulked about the community, hooked up with my old buddies, and ran around at night. We had no place to call our own and often slept in the car, huddling under blankets to fend off the night chill. We lived from day to day, sometimes