The Amish Midwife - By Mindy Starns Clark Page 0,34

that he was trying to flirt with me. I smiled back and then turned away, suppressing a laugh. He was trouble, that one.

“Who is Will?” I asked Marta, not surprised when she didn’t answer. Instead, she focused on her driving as she headed toward the highway. Her face was still so pale, I decided not to press the issue for now.

Glancing back toward the busy farm we had just left, I thought about all of the various people I had met there. Amish families were so large I wondered how anyone could keep track of their names, much less their various connections. “So tell me again how everyone here is related,” I said.

Settling back in her seat and relaxing her grip on the wheel, Marta explained that Alice was the mother of Nancy, who was married to Benjamin. “Alice and her husband didn’t have any sons, so their son-in-law runs the family business.” She went on to say that Nancy and Benjamin had one daughter and three sons. The youngest, Ezra, was the red-headed boy we had watched getting scolded. The middle boy, John, was married to Sally, the patient we had come to see.

“Their daughter, Hannah, is also a patient of mine. She’s due in May. I have an appointment with her in just a couple of days.”

“What about their oldest son? What’s his name?”

Marta hesitated a moment before answering. “Their oldest son is Will. He runs a large nursery,” she said evenly, and then she pursed her lips tightly, as if she had said too much.

“So who is Christy?” I asked, changing tactics.

Marta grunted at my persistence. “The twins’ older sister. She’s eleven.”

“And they are the children of… ?”

“Will. They are the children of Will. But they stay with their Aunty Hannah—or sometimes Nancy and Alice—during the day.”

“Why? Where’s their mother?”

Marta simply shook her head, and I could tell by the set of her chin and the grip of her hands on the steering wheel that this line of conversation was closed. She put on her blinker, slowed, and turned onto a wider road. Frustrated, I stared out of my window and counted to ten, knowing I should hold my tongue.

“So you grew up Mennonite?” Marta asked finally, breaking the silence.

“I did.”

“General Conference, then? Certainly not Old Order.”

“There aren’t any Old Order left in Oregon,” I said, explaining that the Old Order Mennonites came in the late 1880s but over time joined less conservative groups. “The little church I grew up in is now independent.” Though that church was by no means liberal, I’m sure I appeared to be, especially to Marta. Especially because I no longer even identified myself as Mennonite.

“How is it you know nothing about the Amish?” she asked.

I bristled. “Why should I? There hasn’t been an Amish settlement in our region for more than a hundred years.” I didn’t add that in Pennsylvania, the Amish and Mennonites may have been closely linked, but in Oregon they weren’t. In fact, no one there ever gave the Amish much thought unless something was in the media.

“You really didn’t know that in the Amish culture children stop school at the eighth grade?”

I shook my head, certain I would have remembered that. “So the school we passed is it? A one-room, eighth-grade education?”

Marta nodded. Despite Sally’s earlier assurance that the learning continued beyond school, I couldn’t help but think that the Mennonites were looking better all the time.

My own experience with the Mennonite religion started out well. How could it have not? I was one of the few children at my parents’ church, and I was adored. I also got the faith part early in life. Jesus loved me. God had a plan for my life. I wanted to be baptized as soon as I could. I even wanted to wear the head covering at first, although my motivation was—back then—that I wanted to wear what Mama had worn.

But the older I grew and the more I read, the more confused I became. Congregations had split over whether or not to have Sunday school and whether baptism should be by immersion or pouring water over the head. Head coverings varied from group to group. In middle school wearing a head covering set me apart, but by high school I felt like an outcast. How could wearing pants instead of a skirt seem immodest? Did it really matter whether a woman’s head covering was heart shaped or round? Had God stopped listening to my prayers once I put mine