Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [6]
Titus was my next-oldest brother and my friend. We got into many scrapes together. We played around our pond in the warm summer months, fashioned rafts out of old fence posts, and sailed the “great sea.” We shared books and dreams. Collected stamps. And fussed and fought a good bit as well. The three of us—Stephen, Titus, and I—formed our own clique. We were known as the “three little boys.”
I was just shy of three years old when my last sister was born. Rhoda displaced me as the baby. During our childhood days, she ran around outside with me, a tomboy to the core. Of all of us, she was the only one who could truly communicate with animals. Any animals—cats, horses, cows. She even tamed a Holstein steer and hitched it to a cart. Drove it around like a horse while the massive steer ambled along contentedly. Rhoda was the tenth child and once again evened out the boy/girl ratio at five each.
Nathan broke that tie for good. The last, the eleventh child, and the sixth son. He and Rhoda hung out together a lot, as I hung out with my older brothers. When Nathan was about a year old, he nearly died after he pulled a pot of boiling water from the kitchen stove onto his head. Suffering third-degree burns, he had a high fever and lingered between life and death for several days. My father, ever reluctant to go to a doctor, refused to take him to the hospital. Instead, my parents applied a homemade lard-and-dough poultice and wrapped the burns with gauze. Eventually Nathan recovered. The burns healed, but the scars still remain about his head and neck.
Me, I was a raggedy little boy with a mass of wild, uncontrollable, curly black hair and large, deep-set, brooding brown eyes. I was very softhearted and sensitive, more so than my brothers. And a bit shy. Not particularly manly traits in the earthy culture that had produced me.
Once I caught a young sparrow that was fluttering vainly against a windowpane in the barn. But instead of twisting its head from its body and throwing it to the lurking cats, as I’d seen my brothers and friends do countless times, I walked a few steps through the barn door to the open air and set it free.
I never told anyone.
As I would come to discover later in life, one shouldn’t be condemned for simply craving freedom.
* * *
My parents, David L. Wagler and Ida Mae Yoder, like most of the families in Aylmer, came from southern Indiana. Both Mom and Dad were born into old, established families in Daviess County, at that time a forlorn, backward place on the road to nowhere. Well established, but just different. Daviess is looked down on, ever so slightly, by staid blue-blooded folks in settlements like those in Holmes County, Ohio, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Like Nazareth in the Bible, nothing good can come from Daviess. Not much, anyway. People don’t actually say that out loud, at least not in my hearing. Blue bloods are way too polite for that. But I know they think it.
I’m pure Daviess County stock. About as undiluted as it gets.
Mom and Dad’s history did not particularly interest me growing up. My parents were my parents. They were just always there and always had been. Immovable, like the sheer rock face of a mountain cliff. And as indestructible.
It is difficult to imagine my parents as infants or young children because, being Amish, the family had no pictures. But they were children. In a time before penicillin, when diseases and plagues stalked the earth and infant-mortality rates were staggeringly high. Either could easily have succumbed at birth, or certainly well before reaching adulthood.
They were normal children, I suppose. Intelligent. Inquiring. Both were among the youngest in their respective families, welcomed by clans of clamoring older siblings.
David Wagler was a little boy in homemade denims and galluses and tiny rumpled shirts, with coal-black curly hair. Ida Mae Yoder, a little girl who stood about shyly with hands clasped before her like a protective