Growing Up Amish Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 didn’t respect the chopper and got too close.
    My personal favorite was the classic 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 don’t 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 Titus. 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 grader—a leader. But in fourth grade I was a tiny tadpole in a vast ocean. A nobody. A scrawny little kid to be kicked around.
    And kicked around I was. But I deserved it. I didn’t know my place. My big mouth was part of the problem. That, and my stubborn nature, which I had inherited from my father.
    I wouldn’t 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 wouldn’t 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 passion.
    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 “Ooohhh,” probably because he couldn’t 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