Amish Confidential (3 page)

In a way, this whole mixed-up scenario is perfectly suited for the Amish in America. Yes, we are deeply wedded to our rules and traditions. But didn’t we travel across the ocean to the land of the free?

CHAPTER 2

HARD LESSONS

I
wasn’t born in a barn or a buggy or on my family’s back porch. I arrived on June 30, 1979, at Lancaster General Hospital in a gleaming delivery room. Despite our famous suspicion of modern advances, Amish people go to doctors and hospitals like other people do. For reasons I’ve never been sure of, medical technology is almost entirely exempt from Amish disapproval. I was the seventh child of Mary and Eli Stoltzfus. I had three brothers and three sisters—Mary, Christian, Sadie, Henry, Samuel and Katie—who ranged in age from two to fifteen when I was born. And I was the tie-breaker. My mother had her first three children at home with a midwife, then went to the hospital for the rest. “Both are fine, but home was cheaper” was all my mother would say about that. Amish women are taught to always try to save money and never, ever make a fuss.

My full Christian name is Levi King Stoltzfus, though when I was little, I didn’t feel like the king of anything. No Amish boy does. I had to listen to my parents, to my teachers, to my older brothers and sisters, to my aunts and my uncles, to the neighbors, to the other adults in our community, to the deacons, to the preachers, to the
bishop—I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few of the other people I was supposed to listen to. But I remember this much: All of them spoke to me as if every syllable that flew from their mouths was the handed-down, sacred word of God. You get used to that when you grow up Amish. People are always telling you what to do and how to do it and acting like Moses just handed them the tablets.

I’m still looking for the place in the Bible where it says you aren’t allowed to listen to the radio or ride in a car or go to a barbershop and get a haircut that isn’t shaped like a porridge bowl. I haven’t found it yet, but I’m still looking. It’s got to be in there somewhere, since so many people I know believe it so fervently!

The “Levi” part of my name comes from the Old Testament, like a lot of Amish names do. It’s right up there in Amish popularity with Eli and Jacob and Amos, or Sarah and Esther for a girl. In any Amish schoolroom, there will almost always be two or three Levis and no Justins or Taylors or Brittneys. I was Levi S. to my teachers long before I was Lebanon Levi to my friends. In the Bible, Levi is the third of Jacob’s twelve sons. The name means “attached” or “joined” in Hebrew. I guess they give you that name so you won’t get too many ideas about straying off as an individual and forgetting the group.

I always liked stories. When I was young I wasn’t allowed to see movies like
Terminator
or
Die Hard
, but I had plenty of Bible stories, the wilder and bloodier the better, as far as I was concerned. Levi’s descendants became the priests of the Israelites. It’s all laid out in Genesis 34. When his sister Dinah is raped by Shechem the Hivite—now
there’s
a frightening name—Levi seeks revenge, resulting in his tribe, the Levites, losing all their property. This seemed terrible but it turned out to be fortunate. When the
Assyrians deported and effectively destroyed most of the Israelite tribes, the landless Levites found refuge with the powerful tribe of Judah—and survived.

Go, Levites!

I
have a few dim memories of my very early years. Clomping across the grass outside our farmhouse when I’d just learned to walk. Bumping against the hay bales in the barn. My mother cooking dinner, my father sitting in his chair, my brothers and sisters chasing each other around the house while I sat on the floor in the living room playing with my little carved wooden toys. My favorites were the ones that were shaped like cows, sheep, horses and any other animals.

I loved my father. He was a large man with big hands and large shoulders. He liked to have fun with his brothers, and he talked in a loud voice. He worked very hard on the farm. According to my mother, when I was really little, I liked to sit next to him while he ate. I’d put my little feet in his lap. “That’s the only way you would eat good,” my mother told me, “sitting right next to your father like that.”

I don’t really remember that, but I’m sure it’s true.

The last memory I have of my father is a September morning in 1981. I was two years old. He’d been out in the fields, early as usual, and had just come back in for a quick breakfast. Since he was just going to be inside for a few minutes, he left his hat on. He sat in the chair where he usually sat, and I climbed into his lap. I remember all of this like it was yesterday. I remember exactly how he looked that morning. I remember how he smelled like fresh-cut grass. I remember him keeping his hat on.

I remember him hugging me as he got up from the chair and said good-bye.

He was working in the barn that day with my brother Henry, who was fourteen at the time. They were filling the silo with chopped-up corn for the livestock to eat. My father was standing next to the tractor, feeding corn onto the cutter’s conveyor belt. As the corn was dumping in, the cutter got clogged somehow. My father reached to unclog it without turning the tractor off. Either he opened the cutter hood too quickly or the hood flew open—we never knew exactly. But somehow he got pulled into the cutter, where his leg was cut off clear up to the hip.

Henry didn’t see it happen. But he certainly heard the grinding machinery and my father’s bloodcurdling screams. My brother spun around immediately and frantically shut the tractor off. There was so much racket in the silo, my mother could hear it in the house. She grabbed me in her arms and we went running, while someone ran to the house of a neighbor, a non-Amish neighbor with a telephone, to call an ambulance.

We all stood beside the tractor and the cutter and my dad, waiting for help to come from downtown Lancaster. It was less than half an hour, but my dad was bleeding hard on the silo floor. It felt like fifteen years. By the time they got him to the hospital and tried to stitch him up, my dad had lost too much blood. There was nothing the doctors could do to save him. He held on for four long days, and then he died.

The next thing I remember is when we were at the viewing, and all my uncles were really nice to me. I remember my aunts and all my cousins being there. I was so young, I didn’t know what it meant exactly to have my father be dead.

There was a little stepstool, what we call a hassock, next to my father’s coffin. I remember standing on my hassock. I reached in and combed his hair. Isn’t it strange, the little details you remember from a time like that?

Three weeks later, my brother Henry burned the barn down.

It’s crazy, but I think he might have blamed himself for my father being killed. The Amish didn’t have anything like grief counseling back then. The neighbors did what the Amish do. They came right over and raised a new barn for us. I think it took two days.

Amish people are warm and generous that way, always ready to help a neighbor in need.

I
was sad for a very long time. I didn’t want to play with the other children. I stayed alone in my quiet little world, passing the hours on the living room floor with my hand-carved wooden animals. I had a tiny cow and a tiny sheep and a tiny goat and three tiny horses—perfect Amish toys. I would line them up in little rows, then knock them down with my hand. Somehow, this made me feel better. When I got tired of playing, I would put all the wooden animals into a wagon that I parked beside my mother’s chair. When friends and neighbors came to visit and console my mother, they also brought new wooden animals for me. I took them and mumbled, “Thank you,” barely looking up from the floor.

The hours stretched on like days. I can only imagine how my mother and my older brothers and sisters felt. It would take a couple of years before I was totally comfortable leaving my mother’s side.

My two oldest brothers, Sam and Henry, were a tremendous help to me. They were out of school already and stayed busy on the
farm. Sam, who was sixteen at the time, was like a dad to me. He took me with him when he went places. He would always buy me candy. He wasn’t married yet, and he treated me like a son.

My uncles came around a lot, my father’s and my mother’s brothers, making a genuine effort to look after us. They inquired about the farm work and constantly asked my mother if she needed anything. My uncle Eli Ebersole let me sit with him at church on Sunday so I wouldn’t always have to sit with my mother. Little boys sat with their mothers in the women’s pews, but older boys got to sit with the men.

Slowly, I came out of my shell. Uncle Eli told me I was a lot like my father. “You’re active,” he said. “You’re talkative. I like seeing you happy.” I’m not sure if he was exaggerating—I know I didn’t feel too happy—or if he was just giving me a name to live up to. But eventually, life started feeling more normal.

Some people said I looked like my father, but I didn’t really know. With the Amish ban on photography, I was working only from memory. To this day, I still wonder what my father would be like, what we would be doing together, where I’d be living, and how I would have grown up differently. As a child, you can’t lose a father like that and not have it affect everything.

A
n Amish widow doesn’t have a lot of dating opportunities, especially not back then. To be fair about it, neither does an Amish widower.

After my father died, you can imagine how busy my mother’s life became, and it wasn’t like she was just sitting around before. Now she was doing everything she and my father had done together, but she was doing it alone. Keeping the farm running, raising seven
children as well as she could, doing it all with hardly any modern conveniences. Sure, my uncles and my brothers pitched in, but that wasn’t the same as having a husband, especially one as vibrant and energetic and competent as my dad.

Without a car, she couldn’t travel far. With all those needy children and animals, she couldn’t be out long. And she was a decade or two older than most of the other single people who were Amish. By and large, the Amish marry early. They’re out of school in eighth grade. They aren’t supposed to have premarital sex. What’s there to do but get married? That’s what many conclude. So for a woman my mother’s age, there weren’t too many prospects around. About the only places she ever went were to church and to the store sometimes, and to see the relatives, who all lived a short buggy ride away.

Really, who was my widowed mother going to meet?

But my mom wasn’t the first Amish woman to lose her husband, and it turned out that the Amish had a system for situations like hers. The Amish have systems for a lot of things. This one had several moving parts.

Friends introduced other friends. Widows and widowers wrote letters back and forth. Occasionally, two people would meet at church. But those were all hit-or-miss possibilities. You couldn’t really count on any of them. So the visiting began.

Someone would get a bunch of widows together with a bunch of widowers. They’d go and visit one another’s houses. It was like group dating—group visiting, really, since the conversations weren’t known for being romantic. They’d bring food along, and people would sit and talk.

It was at one of those group visits that my mother met an Amish deacon from Lebanon County, about an hour’s buggy ride from
her farm in Lancaster County. He came to visit her house with a group. Later, she and a group visited his home. His name was David Peachey. Like my mother, he came from a well-known Amish family. Like my mother, he had a happy life that was marked by sudden tragedy.

On September 20, 1984, three years after my father died, he had been out for a ride with members of his family. His wife, Melinda, was with him in the buggy. So were two of the couple’s nine children, Nancy, twenty-three, and Esther, age seven. They were on Route 419 about a quarter mile south of Newmanstown in Lebanon County. That’s not a very busy road.

They had no idea what hit them.

A pickup truck, driven by a man the authorities said had been drinking, slammed into the back of the Peachey family buggy. According to the felony criminal complaint, Jeffrey Linnette of Newmanstown kept driving after crashing into the buggy, then pulled over and got out of the truck and ran away.

The buggy was totaled. The mother and the older daughter were killed. The father and the younger girl were badly hurt, but their injuries weren’t life-threatening. And the Pennsylvania state police put out word from the Jonestown Barracks to area hospitals, asking that everyone be on the lookout for an accident victim seeking treatment. When Linnette arrived at Reading Hospital with multiple cuts and a broken nose, the hospital staff quickly called the police.

It took a while for the case to wind its way through the state courts of Pennsylvania. Ultimately, Linnette pled guilty to two counts of murder by vehicle and several other charges and headed off to prison.

I
t’s hard to say exactly what drew the two of them together. I never asked, and they never volunteered. Was it the loneliness, the day-to-day hardship or the tragedy they obviously shared? Or was it just a lucky connection? Whatever it was, Deacon David Peachey and my mother, Mary, courted Amish-style. That meant additional visits to each other’s houses—eventually without the rolling widow-and-widower brigade. And I consider all of us blessed by what happened next. The two of them, David and Mary, married, and my mother’s new husband became my stepfather, the man who would truly raise me. From that day forward, I thought of him as and called him my father. His seven children became my stepbrothers and -sisters, and I am so grateful to have them in my life. We moved to his farm in Lebanon County, which was plainer and more rudimentary than ours in Lancaster County had been. When we moved to Lebanon County, I had to leave my friends behind. I had to go to a new one-room Amish school. I wasn’t upset about any of that. I was just thrilled to have a new dad. I didn’t really think of him as my stepdad. From the day he and my mother got married, he just became my dad. With our two families blended together, I guess you could say we were like the Amish
Brady Bunch,
though since we had no television, we had no idea who those people were. And there were way more of us.