Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [57]
Stephen, Titus, and I had always hung together growing up. We were known as the “three little boys.” Nathan, tagging along five years behind me, played and hung out with our sister Rhoda. The two of them were fast friends, and they did everything together as children.
Nathan was sociable enough and made friends in Bloomfield. But compared with his loud, rather opinionated, older brothers, he always seemed shy and withdrawn. He turned sixteen a few months after Titus’s accident. As the baby of the family, Nathan was close to his mother. He hovered over her and protected her.
Dad didn’t harass him that much, not the way he had harassed me years earlier. Mostly he scolded and admonished Nathan for minor infractions now and then. Always quiet, Nathan quickly drifted further and further from his home ties, such as they were. Of us all, only Rhoda made much of an effort to understand him.
And by a few months after his seventeenth birthday, Nathan had crafted plans to leave. Somehow he contacted my old buddies in Valentine, Nebraska. They were eager for another good Amish worker from Bloomfield. And so, like me, he would set out to see for himself that other world. Only he was a bit younger than I was when I left.
But he would not do what I did. He would not sneak away at night. Maybe he still remembered Mom’s shock and tears the morning of my first absence, or the evening we disappeared in the old green Dodge. Maybe he just couldn’t bring himself to treat her like that. Or maybe he had other reasons altogether.
He told me one morning, a warm, balmy day in February, that he would leave after lunch. An English buddy would park out at the end of our long lane. Nathan would walk out to meet him. And leave. Just like that. In broad daylight. At seventeen. He would do that.
Despite myself, I was intrigued and ashamed. Intrigued that he would actually walk out during the day. And ashamed at my own cowardly departure years before. I had sneaked away, not done it openly, like a man.
I worked about the farm that morning, but it was tense. The hours dragged. Finally noon arrived. Mom had cooked our meal. We sat around the table and ate in our normal state of restrained tension.
After the meal, Nathan disappeared into his bedroom. That wasn’t unusual. We always took a short nap after lunch. He quietly showered and packed his things in a light duffel bag. Mom was outside puttering around, maybe hanging laundry on the line. I don’t remember.
Finally Nathan emerged from his bedroom and walked up to Dad, who was sitting in the living room.
“I’m leaving,” he said shortly, abruptly.
Dad looked up at him, uncomprehending. Then it slowly dawned on him what Nathan had just told him.
“What? No, you should not do that,” he said, his face darkening into a serious frown.
Nathan just grunted and walked out, duffel bag in hand, and shut the door behind him. Dad rose from his chair and followed him to the door. He stood there, looking out, unsure of what to say or what to do.
And then Nathan approached Mom, working outside the washhouse. From a distance, I watched. I could not hear the words he spoke to her. Her face, at first turned up to him in a smile, suddenly collapsed in sorrow and fear. No, no. She mouthed the words. Spoke them. I drifted nearer.
Then Nathan turned and walked away from her. Down the gravel drive, the long half mile to the road.
He had gone only a hundred feet or so when she began to call his name, beside herself with horror. Fear. And love.
“Nathan, Nathan, come back,” she cried. “Nathan! Nathan!”
He was her youngest son, her youngest child, her baby. And in that instant, my mind flashed back through the years to another place and time. Back to our childhood in Aylmer. The morning when he left for his first day of school. She had packed his little lunch box, and he walked proudly out the door with Rhoda and