I was over on Stone Mill Road making a house call the day I had my first viewing. I think it must have been soon after I got to Lancaster because it was spring. My patient had just had her first baby girl and thought that she was the most wonderful thing in the world, and that I was a close second. I was basking in my destiny.
So I was in this woman’s kitchen wiping cookie crumbs off my face and hugging and chatting with the fat baby on my knee, when an Amishwoman knocked abruptly at the door and walked in. Her face said nothing. It had that flat look, the one the women use when they’re shopping in Intercourse, the one that means, ‘Don’t come near me.’
By this time I understood the function of the look: it’s a way of keeping distance. The Amish use it occasionally among their own, that is, with certain private situations; and they use it regularly with the rest of us. They do not wish the world to know their problems or their joys or even their shopping list; they do not elect to concern themselves with the world.
The woman asked me if I were Dr Penny, which is what some call me. I said I was and she said, ‘Maybe you’ll be stopping over at Sarah Riehl’s on your way home?’
Sarah was eight months pregnant with her second child. Every indicator was healthy. I couldn’t imagine why she would have anything wrong, but I’d learnt by this time not to ask questions in this sort of situation, mainly because I wouldn’t have gotten answers.
You see, Amish do not acknowledge one another’s pregnancies. No one has told me why; it’s ‘just their way’. When I first came, I would say to my women – who keenly loved news of one another’s families – ‘Do you know so-and-so over in Leola? She’s got the same due date as you do.’
And they would look at me as if not understanding a word and turn away.
Finally one of the older women grabbed me by the ear and took me aside for instruction. ‘Hush, dear, we won’t be needing any talk about who is going to have a baby. You’ll have to learn to stay quiet until after the babies are born.’
I had a pair of sisters who rode together 45 minutes in their buggy to Stephen’s office for antepartum checks and 45 minutes back to their houses together every month. Day came that the first one delivered, I was sitting on the bed, tucking a baby girl into a pink receiving blanket, and I said to the new mother – figuring an exception would be made in this case – that I wondered whether her sister might be having the twin to this one that same day.
I might as well have suggested that we all go out ice skating. ‘Now what would you mean by that?’ she said, and from then on I conformed to their way exactly.
When the Amishwoman came to say wouldn’t I be stopping by at Sarah’s, I could only assume it had something to do with her pregnancy and that it was an urgent matter. It meant ‘Sarah’s pregnant and she’s in trouble. Go now.’
I left quickly, nothing spoken, everything understood, and drove to Sarah’s. The barnyard was jammed with buggies and more were turning in. Team after team were hauling husbands and wives to somebody’s parlour when everyone had fields to plant.
I parked my car in the forest of black buggies and went to the side of the main house. Sarah and her husband, Joel, as is typical for a young couple, didn’t have the main house. They were living in the addition, the part that had been added at some time or another for somebody’s parents. These ‘grossdaadi’ houses are typical in Amish country. The old people, the grandmas and grandpas, when they retire from farming, move out of the central house – the one that’s built for six and seven children and for having church for 50 and weddings for 150 – and into an attached apartment. Actually, it’s a smaller version of the central house. It’s got built-in china closets and everything.
Sarah and Joel had one of these smaller versions. It was fully equipped. Besides the shiny linoleum kitchen floor, on which all Amish home life takes place, besides the china closet, the scrubbed countertop and shining sink, the long table for eating on, for cutting out squares for quilts, for shelling beans and folding clothes, for changing babies – besides all this there was, centered on the long wall of the room, Sarah’s clock, the one that Joel gave her when she agreed to marry him. (Girls will not say they are engaged, but they will say they’ve got their clock.) Over a small sink in the corner was a mirrored cabinet and below it a rod with a towel hanging from it. The towel – white and elaborately embroidered with green thread – was wrapped in a plastic covering. She would have given it to him as her token when she accepted the clock. Also on the wall there was a lumber store calendar that had a photograph of a stream running through a glen; there was a board with hooks and dowels for guests’ hats and cloaks; there was a blue felt painting, which had Joel’s name on it and Sarah’s and the name and birthdate of their first child. There was plenty of space left underneath the first child’s name.
Joel worked at the farm here where they were living and he was learning blacksmithing to make more money so they could get a place of their own. What with all that to do, Joel still always brought Sarah to the office in their buggy. Once they insisted on sneaking me out the back door to show me the buggy; it was lined with green crushed velvet and was equipped with a matching blanket. (Joel the rake, I began to call him, in memorial to his courting days. His hair was red and I could tell he trimmed his spiffy little beard.) He always asked if he could go into the examining room with his wife and he’d lean over the table, inspecting things, pointing out where the baby’s elbow or bottom would raise his wife’s belly like a mole raises the earth, and generally he asked a hundred questions about what was going on. He wasn’t doing it like he was a plant manager, he wasn’t checking to be sure I knew what I was doing; he just didn’t control his curiosity and enthusiasm.
That’s one difference between Amish and city people, especially those who are having home deliveries: the questions they ask. The Amish are reasonable.
I think it’s because they’re used to the idea of birth and to taking care of things at home. It’s a home- and family-centered culture, and the way they have babies is an extension of the way they live. Newborns, for example, live the early months of their lives on the kitchen table – everybody passing by talking to them, squeezing their tummies, picking them up for a bit of carry-around. If the baby’s awake, you’ll find him at the table for meals, his food stirred right up with the whipped potatoes, his swing sitting there next to the bench, his gurgles mingling idly with the silence and the talk of his brothers and sisters, his mother and father.
In a couple of years, he’ll come running into his mother’s room within a couple of hours after the new baby is born. Birth is routine: it doesn’t happen every day, but it happens often; and it happens in the barnyard, so it’s normal and people have an idea of what it’s about and they ask a reasonable number of questions.
Joel and Sarah knew about having babies from their own experience, and Joel’s curiosity about the whole thing was just that. He thought having a family was terrific.
Sarah was maybe 22. That day when I stopped by I found her standing quietly in her kitchen, her arms folded in front of her the way the women do. She was in black and she was surrounded by men and women dressed all in black. As the women arrived, they shook hands with the others and nodded. I stood there for a little while, pleading internally with somebody, anybody, to please tell me what to do. Finally, somebody came over.
‘Joel was building a silo this morning with three other men. They were near done and Joel was up on top when the brickwork collapsed. He fell and was crushed. Must have died right away. We thought maybe you would check to see if Sarah was okay.’
Oh, sure. And I sucked my breath through my teeth.
About that time, the door swung open and in came six Amishmen carrying a wooden casket. Plain wood with a gray stain on it. They slid it onto the kitchen table, opened the lid, and the viewing started up. Believe it or not, I’d never seen a dead person. All that time in hospitals and no corpses. That had been just fine with me. And this wasn’t just a dead person. This was Joel.
A couple of Amishmen walked over to the coffin, looked into it, said things like, ‘Yep, that’s Joel. Doesn’t look like he felt a thing.’ And, ‘I suppose he has some questions saved up he’ll be wanting to ask.’ And then they stepped aside. I forced myself to get in line. What else could I do?
Sarah, seeing that I was quaking and pale, came and took me by the elbow as soon as I got past her husband. It had been Joel, all right, his red beard brushed up.
Sarah gestured for me to follow her.
When we got to the bedroom Sarah said that she wondered if I would check to see if the baby was all right. There was to be a full viewing tonight; hundreds would be coming. She wanted to know if the baby was all right and that it wouldn’t hurt it. Calmly she lay down on the bed so I could examine her and listen to the baby’s heartbeat. I did that and I asked her the right questions, but I couldn’t concentrate. I was staring at the bed.
Not only had Sarah changed into black mourning clothes, not only had she made the house immaculate for the people coming to the viewing, but she had removed the second pillow from her bed.