Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [71]
I would face Sarah and tell her. But when? How? There was never a good time for a tough job like this, but if it had to be done, I might as well get it over with.
With the Stud gone, I drove Kenny, a sad old plug of a horse, to church and the singing. Kenny was almost a caricature compared with the Stud. Big headed. Bony. Klutzy. No one in my position would normally be caught—under any circumstances—driving a horse like that, but I couldn’t have cared less. Little pride remained in me for the trappings of Amish youth. And Kenny did get me to where I was going, albeit at his own snail’s pace.
I don’t remember where the singing was that Sunday night. After the singing, I hitched up Kenny, and we lurched slowly up to where the girls waited for their rides. Sarah flitted from the group and stepped up into my buggy. As I had done dozens of times in the past two years, I leaned over, slid the buggy door shut, clucked, and slapped the reins. Kenny plodded out the drive and lumbered down the road as the other buggies whizzed past us. We had three or four miles to go to get to Sarah’s house.
I remember nothing of our conversation. She chatted about this and that. I mostly grunted in response. We traveled down the highway, then off to the side road leading to her house, the gravel crunching under the buggy wheels. I guided Kenny up to the hitching rail. Sarah moved to get out, but I held her back. Tonight I would not be tying my horse to the hitching rail. Tonight I would not enter her home.
She looked at me with startled eyes through the darkness. And I spoke to her in curt, choppy sentences. I can’t remember my words to her in that moment—all I know is that I spoke to her, brutally and honestly. And after fifteen minutes or so, she walked alone into her home, stunned, crying, and heartbroken.
There is no human penance anywhere that can ever atone for the wrong I did to her that night.
* * *
The news flashed through Bloomfield. Ira had broken up with Sarah. “Oh,” people gasped. “Weren’t they about ready to get married?” “What went wrong? Could it be that he just can’t get settled down? Can’t shake the ‘world’ from his mind?” And their gossip, as often as not, pretty much nailed it right on.
I stopped attending the singings and instead stayed home, reading and brooding. During the week I still hung out at Chuck’s Café. It was my only connection to sanity, at least the way I saw it. My friends there realized I was going through some hard times, but they didn’t pry. They just quietly offered what support they could. And I held on to that world because it was a rock for me in the midst of those terrible days.
My friends and family were around me like sad shadows—separated, silent, but there. To his credit, Marvin never confronted me in anger. Maybe he should have. But he didn’t. It wouldn’t have made any difference. He expressed only sadness, and we spoke about the matter only once. He broke down briefly, wept openly, a thing I had never before witnessed. And then he let it go. We were friends from way back. He recognized and respected that. And he showed me the meaning of true friendship during those bleak days.
I saw Sarah now and again, but I never talked to her much, other than an awkward greeting. She came around periodically to Titus and Ruth’s house, just down the lane. And one afternoon, after spending some time there, she walked up to our home to see Mom—at least that was the official reason. But she really wanted to see me. She had some things to tell me. I walked out with her to the banks of our pond, and