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CHAPTER 12

We left Texas one evening in the spring of 1991. The next night we stayed in a motel in Alabama. Twenty-hours later we arrived in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where we camped out and had a barbecue. The next morning we got up, and went on top of Lookout Mountain. The girls had a great time.

We walked around the mountain, and found a waterfall. Fran and I took off our shoes , walked in the water and prayed to God. We also spent that night in Chattanooga, and did some fishing. Debra and Rebecca loved every minute of it. The next morning we left for New York State. When we got to New York, reality started to hit us.

I hadn't seen my brother Pete for fifteen years, and a few years before this, we had gotten a message that my Dad had died. Fran and I hadn't seen either of our families for a long time. What if the Amish ways hadn't changed at all? What if they treated us like they did in Guernsey County, Ohio back in 1982? Still, we felt we owed our daughters a chance to know their relatives, even if it didn't work out.

We arrived in Depeyster, New York twenty-four hours later. All we had were addresses. No one knew we were coming. We drove around Depeyster area for about half an hour, trying to locate my sister Mary and her husband John's place. John had a sawmill and machine shop. The electric company was working on the power lines outside of Depeyster. We stopped and asked them, if they could direct us to John's sawmill. They told us on the Mayhew Road that we couldn't miss it, and it is right out by the road.

John had a lot of logs piled up and a lot of junk everywhere. We rode off the east road onto Mayhew road. The second Amish farm we came to, a woman was working in the garden. We stopped, and I said, "Excuse me. Can you tell me where Gingerich's sawmill is?" "About a mile up the road on the left-hand side . You can't miss it." We thanked her and headed that way.

The woman was right about one thing you couldn't miss it. The sawmill was right by the road, and so was the shop. There was a little garden in between the house and shop, and the house was also right by the road. Sister Mary was working in the garden, and two men were running the sawmill . We drove past, but nobody recognized us, or our out of state plates. We went on down the road about a mile, and turned around and came back. We stopped at the garden, where Mary was hoeing.

I rolled my window down and said, "Hi, Mary."

She stopped hoeing, and replied in a rough tone of voice, "What do you want?"

Mary had changed some she looked like she had seen some rough times.

When she got to the van, I asked, "Don't you recognize us?"

"How could I?" she said. "I've never seen you before." .

I took off my sunglasses, and tears were running down my cheeks. "Mary, I'm your brother. It's me, David." Mary stood in total shock for a minute, which seemed like half an hour. Then, she called one of her daughters, and told her daughter to run to the shop and get Dad.

When John came to the van he talked in a very low voice. We told John and Mary we wanted to go back to the Amish and asked them, if we could stay at their place until we got on our feet, maybe work for John at the sawmill.

"I don't see why not," John said. "Do you have any of your Amish clothes left?" Mary asked.

"A few," I said. "But none for Debra . Mary sent her daughter to the house to get some clothes for Debra. Debra's full name was Debra Kay Yoder. Kay was short for Katie, so she had to be named Katie now, since we were to be Amish. After Mary's daughter brought the clothes out to the van, we told them we would be back in an hour or so. Then we headed toward Canton to a roadside rest, where we changed into our Amish clothes.

An hour later we arrived back at sister Mary's place all dressed up in Amish clothes. We parked the van on the opposite side of the road from their house on land that belonged to an Englishman. The reason we left and changed into Amish clothes was because they preferred that we didn't walk in their house with English clothes on. I still never forget the thoughts that went through my mind when we first walked in sister Mary's house.

Mary now had eleven kids, and I hadn't seen one of them until this day. The house smelled like dirty diapers, and wasn't exactly clean. From our life style in Houston, Texas to this was almost too big a change for me to be able to take it.
All their kids were just staring at us like we were some kind of freaks. It was around their dinnertime, so Mary served us dinner. After dinner I walked out to the sawmill. The guy running the sawmill was Joe Miller, and the guy taking the lumber away from the saw was Norman Miller.

That evening John sent Joe to my parents, my brother Pete's and my sister Emma's place, to let them know we were at John's place and wanted to rejoin the Amish. I guess my brother Pete and sister Emma were in shock when Joe gave them the news, but my parents broke out in tears, they'd figured they'd never see us again. I was no longer allowed to smoke cigarettes, so the next day John and I went to Depeyster, to get a smoke pipe and tobacco.

I bought the pipe and tobacco, and then walked outside the store. I nearly fainted when I looked across the street: there was my Mom and Dad in their horse and buggy. I thought my Dad had died. As I walked up to the buggy to greet my parents I stopped, leaned over the back buggy wheel, and broke down and cried.
Finally, I made it to the front of the buggy and said, "Hi to Mom and Dad." They also both broke down and cried. They were both so glad to see me again. Now Mom and Dad wanted to see my wife and their two grand daughters, too. Mom and Dad followed John and I back to John and Mary's place.

Mom and Dad stayed for an hour or two, but spoke in a very low tone of voice. I asked Mom and Dad why they never responded when I wrote them a letter asking about my Dad's health. I'd had a message saying he'd died. However, they couldn't give me an answer. I'll never understand, but that's just the way it is. After about three days, my sister Emma and her husband came to visit us. They stayed for a couple hours.

I don't think I spoke more than a couple words to my sister Emma. I guess Emma was still in shock. On the fourth day brother Pete and his wife came to visit. Pete didn't have much to say, either. On Saturday, I took the van and the rest of our English clothes to a flea market. John came and picked me up with his horse and buggy. We sold our English clothes for almost nothing. We let the van go for a couple thousand dollars.

On Sunday it wasn't their church Sunday, so we spent the day at sister Mary's house. Since we were excommunicated from their church, my family and I had to eat at a separate table. It was really hard for us to talk to the company, because we were afraid we'd say the wrong thing, and they'd look down on our daughters and us. Our two daughters were to really enjoying playing and talking with their cousins.

The following week I started working on the sawmill . I had to watch what I did, as I was excommunicated. I couldn't help them pick up anything heavy, but they could help me. During the week in the evenings, Amish people showed up to visit , trying to make us feel welcome. Of course, sometimes they just came to see what we looked like or how we acted, whether we repented enough, and were humble enough. Often the married people wanted to sneak peak at our daughters to see how they played and acted, since they were born and raised English.

The next Sunday it was time to go to church. We told sister Mary and brother-in-law John that we were sick and we weren't ready to go to church. However, they insisted that we had to go to church and face everyone. So we went. There were thirteen of them in their family, and four of us in ours. That made seventeen people to pile on a two-seated buggy.

I'd never seen a buggy loaded down so much. There were little heads everywhere, and there was only one horse hitched to the buggy to pull all of us. We arrived at the church and were one of the last families to get there. Red Elmer's had church at their house that Sunday. We unloaded the women by the house and I wished them good luck. That was around nine o'clock in the morning; I knew I wouldn't be able to talk to them before one or one thirty that afternoon.

Brother-in-law John took the buggy behind the barn and unhitched the horse. I wasn't allowed to help John unhitch the horse, because I was excommunicated. John took the horse in the barn and tied him up. There was a group of men standing in and outside the barn. As was the custom, I had to shake all their hands. That was hard to do. The line looked very long and everyone was staring at me. I started shaking everybody's hand. I began outside the barn, and worked my way inside, all the while looking down at the ground.

When I got in the barn, I noticed there were some boys in the background peeking around the stall. I heard a voice say, "He was English a long time. Look at what he looks like now with that short hair. I was finished shaking their hands, and it was time for the men to start making their way to the house to start church services. The Bishop made the start and the Preachers followed with elders of the church behind them. All the members went in by their age. I followed brother-in-law John, because he was just older than me. We got to the house to the main entrance. The door had a spring on it. John went in, and the door was constantly open.

As each man passed through the door they held it for the next person. However, when I went through the door, I had to let the door shut. Since I was excommunicated they couldn't pass through a door that was held open by me. We had to pass through the kitchen to get to the living room, and all the women in the kitchen were staring at me as I was going to the living room. I got to the living room and was seated on the third bench up by a little table, where the leading singers sat. Six older men were seated at the little table, and they passed out the hymnbooks.

Their tradition was to share a hymnbook with the person sitting next to you. They gave me a hymnbook, but I wasn't allowed to share it with anybody. There were roughly five benches in the living room full of men and boys. The younger married men and the younger boys were seated in the kitchen. There were also four benches full of older women and girls in the living room.

Fran and our two daughters were seated in the kitchen. These benches were all hardwood with no cushions or backs to them. It was a long hard day. I hung my head most of the day. Whenever I did look up, I found everyone in the room staring at me. This church was fairly large for an Amish church. There were twenty-three families in all, I believe, and each family had between six and fourteen children. Plus there were a few strangers from the other Amish church district there that day .
Church was over around one thirty in the afternoon. As we were leaving the house after church services, brother-in-law John said, "Would you like to stay for dinner at church?"

"Fran and I had talked it over this morning. We decided it would be best if we just went home, since if we stayed, we'd have to eat at a separate table."

One of the preachers pulled brother-in-law John off to the side, and told John, "It would be nice if David and Fran could stay for dinner, now would be the time to break their spirit. Try to talk them into staying." But we felt shunned and humiliated enough for one day. I insisted on going home, and we went home.

We ate our dinner at home, which was at sister Mary's house . All this was almost more than Fran, our daughters, and I could handle for one day. There were all kinds of rumors going around the Amish about us. Some were good, but most were bad. In the following weeks, I worked on the sawmill. John had a lot of English customers at his sawmill and shop.

It appeared that everyone was curious how we were doing being Amish again. Fran helped sister Mary out a lot in the house, as Mary had her hands full with all those kids. After two months had gone by, then I told John and Mary we would either built a house, or rent a house from an Englishmen and go to work for him. "It won't be good for you to go to work for an Englishman," John said. "You were English for a long time, and on top of that the elders of the church won't like it either." John then took it upon himself to build a house for us . It would be twenty-four by thirty-two with two bedrooms, one living room and one kitchen.

The house would be built like a doublewide trailer, and put on a floating foundation in case we decided to move it at a later date. John got some of the Amish together and they helped build the house. Some days six people showed up , other days a dozen or so. Being excommunicated I couldn't directly give them any orders, nor, could I buy the lumber and the rest of the materials needed off of John. John was always the man giving orders.

They let me work on the house, but I had to work off on the side by myself. The house was livable within two weeks. A lot of Amish in New York poured their hearts out to us. We didn't have time to put out a garden that summer, so a lot of the Amish showed up in the evenings and brought us food from their gardens. We felt we were starting to adjust to the Amish way of life, once again.

I had promised my wife and two daughters that when the house was finished, we would all go to Ohio and visit Fran's parents. We got bus tickets for the four of us. Sister Mary and John also got tickets to go with us. We left one evening around four o'clock and got on the Greyhound bus. The next day at two-thirty we arrived at the Newcomerstown truck stop in Guernsey County, Ohio.

It was a long bus ride. Fran's parents Dan and Barbara were at the truck stop to pick us up. They had a two-seated buggy with two horses. We didn't know what to expect from Dan and Barbara. Barbara had a great big smile on her face, but Dan didn't say too much. My hair still didn't cover my ears, and I knew Dan wouldn't like that, but there was nothing I could do about it. Katie and Rebecca couldn't speak Pennsylvania Dutch yet, so I had two strikes against me from the beginning.

Brother-in-law John and sister Mary had to find an Englishman to take them out to Dan's place . Our ride in the horse and buggy from Newcomerstown to Fran's parents' house took us two hours. Dan didn't drive very fast, because he didn't believe in being mean to the animals. Fran spent four days at her parents' house. If any of the Amish wanted to see us they had to come to Fran's parents' house. We weren't about to waste any of our precious time visiting anyone else except Fran's parents and two sisters.

The last evening we were there, six families showed up to visit. The next morning we left for home again. When we got back home to New York, I started shoeing horses and working in the sawmill part time. John's sawmill business was going down hill. September arrived rather quickly and it was time to send Katie and Rebecca to the Amish school.
The girls were kind of excited to start school on the other hand, they didn't know what to expect. We tried to explain to them what to expect. Since brother-in-law John was the head of the school board, he promised he'd make sure the other kids in school wouldn't tease Katie and Rebecca about their past.

It was only a one-room schoolhouse. There were three board members and one teacher and the grades went from first through the eighth. A total of about thirty-two students attended the school. They studied basic spelling, math, reading and writing and, of course, German writing, reading and spelling were must. Katie never studied any German in school before, and neither had Rebecca.

Rebecca was in the first grade. Katie should have been in the fifth grade, but since she went to the public school before, and was so far advanced, the school board decided to put her in the sixth grade. The school board talked to the teacher and told her to go easy on Katie and Rebecca, and make sure the rest of the Amish kids didn't tease them. The school board didn't spend any time at the schoolhouse unless they thought there was trouble the teacher couldn't handle.

The school was called Mud Lake, and was located on Mayhew Road. Katie and Rebecca had to walk about four tenths of a mile to school. Their teacher was a single girl, at the age of twenty-one. When Katie and Rebecca had their first day in the Amish school, they came home about three-thirty in the afternoon. Neither one of the girls could talk fast enough they were both so excited. "There was no cafeteria and no principal!" Katie said. It wasn't what they were expecting to see. However, they both caught on very quickly what the rules were.

September went by quickly. It was nice to be living with my sister Mary and her family. By now our daughters were well adjusted to the Amish way of life, and I was starting to spend more time with the rest of my family. We also had our own two-seated buggy and a horse. If we got depressed, we hitched up the horse to the buggy in the evening and went to visit my family. My family helped us through a lot of depressing times, which meant a lot to us.