Feature: Abner Comes Home

The swick, swick of a straw broom announced Abner’s father, John Stoltzfus, as he swept his way into the room. He stopped when he saw Abner, and his face broke into a wide grin, the smooth upper lip curling over the long dark beard. I wasn’t sure why Abner had brought me here until his father caught sight of me.

a gleaming monster—red Thunderbird— jacked up in the rear—up on its haunches

The father reached out and shook my hand. I realized Abner hadn’t brought me here to show me something, but just the opposite: He had brought me here for his father’s approval, and received it. “Come inside,” he said, setting his broom aside.

The father’s warmth surprised me, and confounded the world’s expectation of the Amish. They seem so stern to outsiders, glowering at tourists from their plows along Lancaster roadsides, so strict and faithful to the Ordnung, their rules for behavior. But pain is pain and love is love, and the Abners had pricked a flow of both; the Amish embraced them in the only way they knew how. Abner X. Stoltzfus’s father Aaron wrote a heart-wrenching confession to the judge in Philadelphia, alluding to his son’s rebirth in Christ:

In Jesus Name,
Trying to express myself about
Abner and the Community.
Abner is like a New Creature
To his Parents and the Community.
Plus he does not like to miss church.
(What a Blessing thank God)
… forgive our mistakes
that me and Emma and Abner
have done. We apoligze.

“Worse than prison, worse than any of it, was the shame,” Abner had said. “I embarrassed my father. My family. My mother had dark hair before all this.” But this hardened community cradled the Abners in its bosom, and continues to protect them even now. As I searched for them recently, I heard the truthful Amish finesse the truth at every turn: “Oh, well, my. There are many Abner Stoltzfuses here. … ” Strictly true. And Abner X. seemed to enjoy special protection as a baptized member of the church, so that at every corner I saw the heel of his hobnailed boot, the flutter of his coat, and then he was gone, disappeared. Eventually he sent word that he, like most Amishmen, didn’t want to be written about.

At the Stoltzfus dairy, Abner and his father traipsed across a yard toward the father’s home, a large white two-story. Abner’s grandfather lives in an identical house just behind it, and his brother lives in another one beyond that. Around the family compound, rich, heathery pasture stretched in every direction. Abner could have had this, a portion of the farm and a quadruplet house, with the same simple roofline and inviting front door. I pictured him standing with a scale in his hand, balancing the Amish homestead on one side and a pack of cigarettes on the other. No: the option of cigarettes.

At first, leaving the community was hard, he said. No one screamed. No one yelled or cursed, or disciplined him. But a quiet knowledge filled the farm: Abner’s ways were not the old ways.

It felt like plowing in winter, straining against unbroken ground. He was an Amish man, behaving wrongfully. But once the ground broke, the straining stopped. Suddenly he was an English man, behaving admirably. “It was fine once they accepted that I was gone and wasn’t coming back,” he said. Which is a curious description, considering that Abner never actually went anywhere. Not geographically, at least. He still moves about the Amish community every day. The father and son still walk together from barn to house, smiling, pointing at this rabbit, listening to that bird, feeling warmth from the same sun.

Inside the house, Abner’s mother and teenage sister welcomed us into the living room while the father slipped off his mucky boots. The mother’s hair glimmered under her bonnet: silver now. She and Abner’s sister stood with hands clasped, and seemed to wait for something to happen. How long had they waited? Everything about them, their coloring, the texture and style of their clothing, their posture, gave the impression they had climbed down from a Vermeer painting. Especially Abner’s young sister, who must know at least something about the world outside. The Milkmaid, or The Girl with a Pearl Earring. No: Woman Holding a Balance.