aWait a few years. Your time will come soon enough.a And so, I watched my brothers leave, one at a time.

Each morning they walked out of the house, swinging their lunch pails beside them. They returned each afternoon around three thirty and told me about their daya"all the things they had seen and learned. And of the books theyad read.

aWhen you turn six,a my mother told me. aThen you can go.a Days pa.s.sed.

Then weeks.

Then months.

And then one August, the big day arriveda"my sixth birthday. Now I was old enough. And big enough. Finally, I could go to school.

Iall never forget my first day. I left the house with my brothers and trudged importantly down the road, clutching my pencils and a ruler. Swinging my new blue-green lunch box, I strode bravely up the cracked and ancient concrete walkway and up the steps into the big white schoolhouse.

Many of my cla.s.smates had already arrived and were milling about. Harold Stoll. Jerry Eicher. Willis Stoll. Abraham Marner. Lydia Wagler (my first cousin). And Lois Gascho.

We stood around, wide eyed in awe. A few looked as if they might cry. The second and third graders marched about, casting condescending glances at the little first-grade rookies.

I both liked and feared our teacher, Miss Eicher. Like most teachers, she had her favorites. I wasnat one of them.

I did have some small advantages, though. I knew my ABCs. Iad learned them at home from my older siblings. I could already read a bit from the tattered remnants of d.i.c.k and Jane books we had at home. And I could count in blocks of ten.

I quickly fell into the routine at school.

We learned to print the letters of the alphabet on rough paper in uneven, heavily pressed pencil lines. We learned to count and write numbers, and to add and subtract. And we learned to speak English. That was the rule. Only English at school. No Pennsylvania Dutch. After a few months, we were all moderately fluent in the language.

On the whole, I really liked school, although I could never admit it.

Girls liked school.

Boys werenat supposed to.

When asked by an adult, I scoffed and claimed I didnat. But I did.

The first year pa.s.sed, and before long, I was one of the second graders. Now I could strut about with my cla.s.smates and look pityingly on the poor, confused little first graders, huddled in groups looking as if they might cry.

Miss Eicher was my second-grade teacher too. And no, I still wasnat one of her favorites.

I loved books and spent hours absorbing great chunks of words, to the detriment of my other studies. During that year, my cla.s.s learned penmanship, writing in script. I hated it pa.s.sionately. Our usual lesson consisted of writing sentencesa"usually about ten or twentya"from our lesson book. When we were done, Miss Eicher allowed us to go outside and play, even though it wasnat recess.

My friends Jerry and Harold zipped through their writing exercises, scrawling their sentences in mere minutes before rushing outside, while I sat at my desk, laboring mightily to finish my writing so I could join them. It took me forever.

Eventually, my frustration got the best of me. One fateful day, I scrawled a few illegible lines across the barren expanse of notebook paper and rushed outside to join my cla.s.smates. Miss Eicher usually didnat check our writing a.s.signments anyway.

In our next writing cla.s.s, I did it again. And again, in the writing cla.s.s after that. And again and again.

I got away with it for weeks. It was my little secret.

But the day of reckoning approached.

Then it arrived.

I was heading in from outside after the first bell rang when I heard someone call my name. Miss Eicher wanted to see me at my desk. Right now.

A tremor of fear sliced through me.

I walked inside with a sinking heart. Miss Eicher was sitting at my desk, looking down at my writing notebook, a crowd of my cla.s.smates cl.u.s.tered around her. A low murmur drifted through the group. I caught s.n.a.t.c.hes, whispers. aA-a-ah.a aO-o-oh.a aDidnat do his writing.a aJust made scribbles.a aTeacher just caught it. . . .a As I walked the gauntlet, my cla.s.smates lined the aisle, staring with wide accusing eyes and jostling for a better view of the imminent inquisition. I sensed no pity in them. Only morbid fascination.

I approached my desk, feet dragging, and stood with a hanging head before my judge. She looked at me sternly.

aWhatas the meaning of this?a she demanded, motioning to the notebook spread open on my desk. The d.a.m.ning scribbles seemed to leap from the pages, screaming accusations at me before all the world.

I stood mute and wide eyed. Iad get a whipping now for sure. Miss Eicher had her established methods for dealing with miscreants. The prisoner would be escorted outside to the woodshed and left there to ponder his or her fate while Miss Eicher came back into the cla.s.sroom, slid open a desk drawer, pulled out a st.u.r.dy wooden ruler, and marched back to the woodshed, where swift and severe punishment would be administered.

I had seen it. I had heard it. It had happened to my friends. Now my time had come, I knew. I swallowed, my brown eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g with tears. But I didnat cry.

I feared Mom would find out. Oh, the shame. And Dad. Another whipping would follow at home. The seconds crawled by. Miss Eicher did not soften her stern, unrelenting gaze.

Abruptly, she instructed my cla.s.smates to fetch their writing books so she could check their work. Jerry and Harold, the two swiftest writers, scrambled piously to comply. They gleefully showed her all their finished lessons. They cast scornful glances at me. They wouldnat dream of doing what I had done.

I stood hunched and silent, guilty before them all.

Then Miss Eicher abruptly got up, rang the second bell, and afternoon cla.s.ses resumed.

That was it.

She did not spank me, or even tell my parents (as far as I knew). But she did make me stay inside at recess and during lunch hour and finish every single abominable writing exercise I had avoided.

It took several days.

After I had laboriously completed the last dreadful a.s.signment, she released me to join my cla.s.smates, and I ran outside gratefully.

It was never mentioned again.

Nor was it forgotten.

While I might have struggled with the tediousness of writing drills, it was the bigger questions in life that really held my attentiona"even at such a young age.

Twice a month, on Friday afternoons, we had art cla.s.s, which consisted of the studentsa drawing simple things like birds and a sun with cascading beams in the upper corner and short slogans like aG.o.d Is Lovea or aLovea at the bottom.

One day at recess my friends Willis, Jerry, and Philip and I stood examining the art displayed on the wall and trying to guess who drew what. One drawing had the usual aLovea slogan at the bottom.

We stood there with our hands in our barn-door pants pockets, or with thumbs hooked on our gallusesa"as wead seen our fathers do at churcha"and discussed whether we really should love everyone. Even our enemies.

We agreed we should.

aBut what about Satan?a Philip asked. aShould we love him, too?a We respected Philip. He was a year older and a grade above us. Next year he would graduate to the west school where the big students went.

It was a startling thought. We grappled with the disturbing concept. Satan was wicked; that we knew from countless sermons. Head tempted Eve in the Garden and even now lurked about trying to get little children to do bad things.

But werenat we supposed to love everyone? Even him? We could not imagine that we should hate anything or anyone.

aSatan is bad. We shouldnat love him,a I said tentatively. But I was unsure of my words.

In the next few minutes, the four of us hashed it out with serious observations and solemn comments, balancing the sin of loving evil against the sin of not loving at all.

We finally reached a consensus and agreed that perhaps we were obligated to love Satan just a little bit. Not much. Just enough so we wouldnat hate him, because hating was wrong.

Satisfied, we disbanded as the bell rang and returned to our desks.

We told no one of our conclusion. But I pondered the issue in my heart for months.

6.

Soon after school began came the first frosts of fall.

As autumn descended on the farm, row upon row of whispering green cornstalks faded slowly to a greenish brown. Neighbors gathered and helped one another as teams and wagons plodded through the fields and returned laden with long, heavy bundles of cornstalks flowing over the sides and dragging on the ground.

The corn bundles were then thrown into the ravenous chopper, where they were shredded to bits before being propelled up the long pipes into the silo until it was bulging to the brim. The air reeked with the wet, pungent odor of fresh chopped cornstalks.

And every year Mom warned us all with terrifying tales of the awful things that could happen if one didnat respect the chopper and got too close.

My personal favorite was the cla.s.sic tale of the little four-year-old boy from somewhere, sometime, who disappeared one fall without a trace. Right at silo-filling time, of course. He had wandered too close and fallen in when they were filling the silo and the chopper had devoured him. Nothing was seen of him again until the next winter, when they were throwing down silage to feed the cows. They found his chopped-up remains, in tiny bits, mixed in with the silage. We listened, wide eyed and appalled. I donat know if the story was actually true.

We all watched ourselves around the chopper nevertheless. No sense becoming a cautionary tale for future generations.

In the fall of 1970, I entered the fourth grade at the west school, where the big children went. I looked forward to joining the upper grades and proudly trudged off with my brother t.i.tus. From the first day, things did not go so well.

Back at the east school, I was a big fish in a little pond. A tough third gradera"a leader. But in fourth grade I was a tiny tadpole in a vast ocean. A n.o.body. A scrawny little kid to be kicked around.

And kicked around I was. But I deserved it. I didnat know my place. My big mouth was part of the problem. That, and my stubborn nature, which I had inherited from my father.

I wouldnat give in, but instead, fought my tormentors. Of course, I was instantly overwhelmed every time. It was pretty bad. One evening on the way home from school, a big eighth grader sat me down in a mud puddle on the road because I refused to retract a derogatory taunt I had foolishly hurled at him.

I wouldnat call them bullies, necessarily, the guys who tormented me. To them, I was just a smart-aleck kid who needed to be shown his place in the order of things.

Still, that fourth-grade year was the worst of my eight years at Amish schools. I hated it with a pa.s.sion.

But it could have been worse. A lot worse, for a lot longer. As it was for another Aylmer Amish boy: Nicholas Herrfort.

Almost every Amish community has that unusual, or odd, family, as do most English communities, I suspect. They dress differently. Talk differently. Act differently. In Aylmer, that family was the Herrforts.

Solomon Herrfort had moved to Aylmer as a single man. He emerged from the backwater area of the plain and very conservative Milverton, Ontario, community. He worked for a time as a hired hand for my uncle, Bishop Peter Yoder. Later, he married Esther Gascho, and they settled on a small farm a few miles northwest of our home.

Solomon was different, no question about it. He was small, lean, and wiry, with a shock of unruly orange hair and a stringy, dirty-orange beard. He was a bit slow and eccentric and hard of hearing. His typical response to any comment was a prolonged aOoohhh,a probably because he couldnat hear what was said to him. We children made fun of him and said he had wax in his ears.

A grove of tall trees obscured the dull brick house on his farm at all times, even on the sunniest day. The house itself was spooky, with many sharply peaked gables. It was always gloomy after dark; the only light was the pale, flickering glow of the dismal little kerosene flame lamps the family used in their home.

The Herrforts never took a turn holding church services in their home like other families, and they rarely socialized with other families in the evenings. Solomon didnat like to be on the road with horse and buggy after dark. The family was as close to reclusive as any Iave ever known.

They were also poor. Really poor. What Solomon did for a living remains a mystery to me. I suppose he farmed a bit and had some goats. I donat know what the family ate. Whatever it was, it wasnat much, and it probably wasnat healthy.

Esther was always frail and in poor health and could never seem to get her housework done. My sisters recall being sent over to help Esther clean her house. The Aylmer families took turns, helping her out as needed. Every time a new baby was born to the Herrforts, the neighbors swarmed in and scrubbed the house top to bottom while Esther was at the hospital.

Solomon and Esther had six or seven children. They all wore ill-fitting, ill-made clothes, and they always looked thin, pale, and sickly.

Children of any age and in any culture are pitiless and cruel and run in packs. And heaven help the ones rejected by the pack. The Herrfort children were taunted and tormented as heartlessly as any I have ever witnessed.

Nicholas, the oldest, was born in 1963, sixteen months behind me. He always seemed much younger because he didnat start school until he was seven; almost all the children from other families started at age six. Nicholas was small for his age and always dressed in thin, shabby clothes and worn-out shoes some other family had given him. His front three teeth were missing, and he had a strange haircut. Straight across his forehead above the eyes, then straight back to the ears, then straight down over the ears. It was different. And we mocked and scorned him for it.

In fact, Nicholas Herrfort provided the perfect defenseless target for just about any kind of mockerya"simply for the general merriment of the crowd.

aAre you a heifer?a the taunt would begin.

aNo, no, Herrfort,a poor Nicholas would respond.

Then again. aAre you a heifer?a aNo, no, Herrfort.a The exchange would be repeated over and over to roars of appreciation and snickers of delight from s.a.d.i.s.tic onlookers.

Nicholas and his sister Nancy were always the last ones chosen for playground games. And neither of them could sing; their flat, toneless voices rang in jarring dissonance when it was their turn to lead a song. One time, Nancy picked a song that no one knew, and the whole cla.s.sroom snickered and scoffed at her mistake until she buried her face in her arms on her desk.

I canat imagine what their existence was like, but the Herrfort children must have developed a dull numbness to the cruel horrors that const.i.tuted an average day in their threadbare and joyless lives.

Several bullies took a particularly twisted joy in making Nicholasas life miserable. They delighted in torturing and actually hurting him physically. The rest of us did not, but we did stand by and watch. We did nothing to stop it. And it was wrong of us, so very, very wrong. All of it.

The mocking.

The tricks.

The jokes.

The laughter.

The torment.

One particular thing still haunts me. I can see it as clearly in my mind as if it happened yesterday.

The school had an outdoor privy located across the yard from the schoolhouse. When Nicholas needed to go during the noon hour, he knew the bullies were keeping careful watch for him. Lurking furtively inside the safety of the schoolhouse, he waited for his chance to sprint to the privy without interference. When he thought the coast was clear, Nicholas would take off running down the walkway at full speed, legs churning desperately, arms pumping, hair flying behind him. But at least one of the bullies always raced after him. Once he caught up, he would kick Nicholas from behind with all his might, laughing and cackling all the while.

In winter, the bullies delighted in chasing him around to the back side of the schoolhouse, pelting him with iced s...o...b..a.l.l.s and rubbing his face and hair with ice and snow, belittling and cursing him just for being who he was. It bruised him physically. It had to hurt, bad. I canat fathom what it did to him emotionally. And the rest of us did nothing to stop it.

Once, one bully egged on another student, younger and smaller than Nicholas, in the school bas.e.m.e.nt. The younger student ran at Nicholas full speed, grabbed his long hair, and actually swung himself off the ground and around Nicholas. Nicholas stammered and staggered, crying, aOuch, ouch, ouch.a The bully whooped and clapped and guffawed and cheered. This happened two or three times, and again, we all stood around and watched until another student finally stepped in and stopped it.