Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [72]
She asked about my plans, and I told her I was leaving soon. She nodded. Absently, she picked blades of grass and dandelion stems from the bank, wove them together, then looped the woven band and tied the ends together, kind of like a little bouquet. Or a heart.
“I hope you find what you’re looking for,” she said, looking right at me. Her blue eyes were pools of infinite sadness.
I could not meet those eyes. I looked down and mumbled incoherently. She still faced me.
“These are my people, here in this community,” she said. She wasn’t pleading. Just telling me. She continued. “They are my family. I could never leave them.”
I looked at her, startled. I had never asked her to leave with me. I hadn’t even remotely considered it. But it was important to her to tell me she wouldn’t go, even if I asked. I wanted to respect that.
“I don’t think you should leave,” I answered gently. “If this is where you belong, stay here among your people. It’s not where I belong. I just can’t do it, Sarah. I’m so very sorry, but I just can’t do it. I tried. Believe me, I tried. I can’t do it. I’m so sorry.”
It was a hard moment for both of us. I sensed the raw depths of her pain and felt the loss in her heart. But my own heart was far from her, and cold. Tears welled in her eyes. She nodded and looked away. I looked out across the pond.
We sat there silently through the eternity of the next few moments. There was nothing more to say. She stirred.
“I have to go now,” she said. I nodded and rose to my feet. As she got up to leave, she tossed aside the little ring of grass and dandelion stems. After she walked away, I picked it up and held it in my hands. It was a work of art, beautifully woven, about the size of a wristband. Too beautiful to discard. I carried it with me into the house and placed it carefully between the pages of a heavy book so it would compress and dry.
Through the years, and all that flowed from them, I somehow managed to preserve that woven ring as a remembrance of the beautiful young girl whose heart I so ruthlessly crushed, whose innocence was so cruelly shattered through no fault of her own. A token of guilt and penance for me, perhaps. But also a token of that time, those harsh and heavy days so long ago, when the world first trembled, then violently shook, then slowly collapsed in ruins around two young Amish people in Bloomfield, Iowa.
* * *
I left late in the spring of 1986. Behind me lay a long and bitter trail, littered with the remains of so many broken dreams, some of which were my own, but mostly those of others.
From my farming partnership with Marvin, I took one fattened steer and sold it at market for a thousand dollars. That and a duffel bag of meager belongings were all I took from almost two years of hard and steady labor on the farm. I didn’t ask for anything more. I was breaking the deal we had made, and he would have a tough go of it as it was. Now he alone would do the work we both did before.
Our good-byes were sad and short. Abrupt, even. There was nothing much to say to Marvin, to Rhoda, to Titus and Ruth, or to my parents. An English friend picked me up at the farm and dropped me off at the station in Bloomfield, and I boarded the bus around noon that day. I sat hunched on the seat, motionless, as it pulled out and headed southeast to my connection in St. Louis, then on to Indianapolis. Then south to Daviess County, the land of my father’s blood.
28
I dozed fitfully, slumped on the reclining vinyl bus seat. It was a comfortable seat for an hour or two—maybe even three—but not for a twelve-hour journey. The diesel choked and growled behind me as the bus rumbled through the night, on and on, hour after hour. Long after midnight we finally pulled into the station. I grabbed my bag and stumbled down the steps, bleary eyed, and scanned my surroundings for my cousin Eli. He had agreed to meet me at the station, even at this unearthly hour.
Soon enough he showed up, accompanied by a troupe of rowdy-looking friends. A band of intimidating, raucous toughs, they