Abandoned Prayers (16 page)

He didn’t fault the information provided. The reports
were clear, the slides excellent. But nothing in the package pointed conclusively to the cause of death.

Further, the anal dilation had been the result of the dying process. He could find no evidence that an object had been inserted into the boy’s rectum. The low level of carbon monoxide found in his blood could be explained as having resulted from breathing tobacco smoke or car exhaust—the amounts were only trace, and by no means lethal.

Pathologists used drug screens to test for the more common lethals—barbiturates and alcohol. None turned up. Certain drugs, however, do not show up unless the lab knows what to look for. Such phantom drugs are a closely guarded secret—for good and obvious reasons.

Dr. Graham favored the view that the child had died a natural death, though not related to an upper-respiratory viral infection the boy may have had. Death due to a seizure disorder such as epilepsy was another possibility, but it too could not be established conclusively, since no medical history was available on the unknown boy.

Dr. Graham disliked leaving the case with a question mark, but he had done all he could.

Like the lights of a hundred cigarettes, fireflies bobbed up and down through the calm of the quiet night air as Dan Gingerich returned from visiting Abe Stutzman’s parents, in Apple Creek. It was after 10:00
P.M
., and since the lights were out, he assumed Eli Stutzman was asleep. Concerned that the noise of the buggy might awaken Stutzman, Gingerich brought it around into the upper driveway. Quietly, by the yellow glow of a kerosene lantern, he put the horse into a stall.

Just as he set foot on the gravel between the barn and the house there was movement at the bedroom window.

“Daniel, Daniel, where is my gun? Where is my gun?” Stutzman called from the window. His voice was full of fear. He begged Gingerich to get his gun and put it away in a safe place—a place where Stutzman couldn’t find it.

Gingerich tried to calm the frantic man. “I’ll take care of it,” he promised.

“Hide it!” Stutzman pleaded.

Gingerich got the gun and put it in the barn.

When he returned, Stutzman explained that he was having horrible nightmares so frightening that he was afraid to close his eyes. One nightmare in particular was unbearable.

In his dream, he said, he knelt before Jesus Christ and confessed his sins. He asked if he would be saved if he
took his own life. Jesus looked at him and said, “Yes, you will be saved.”

Stutzman repeated his question again, just to make sure he understood, and again Jesus told him salvation would be given even if he killed himself. Stutzman had pulled the barrel of his gun to his face and just started to pull the trigger when the weathered hand of an old man reached from behind him and forced the gun away.

It was his father.

One-Hand Eli screamed at his son:
“You will not kill yourself! You will not!”

The next day, Amos and Lizzie Gingerich came to the farm and learned of the nightmare.

“Take my gun away from the farm,” Stutzman begged them. “I don’t trust myself with it.” They packed it in the buggy and took it to their farm for safekeeping. Their son-in-law was in frightening shape. What was going to happen next?

If Stutzman was telling everyone about his nightmare, it was nothing compared to what his twin brothers-in-law had endured. Something terrible had happened to the Gingerich boys, Amos and Andy, when they stayed overnight at Stutzman’s. At the time neither boy had ever spoken directly of it—they only alluded to it years later when more information about their brother-in-law found its way to the formidable Amish rumor mill.

In bed late one night, Andy felt his brother-in-law pushing his pelvis against him. The 15-year-old turned away, thinking Stutzman was having a bad dream. Stutzman made soft sounds, almost a whine, but no words came. Stutzman pushed his pelvis against the boy and pressed his erect penis against Andy’s back several times. Then he stopped.

The boy reasoned Stutzman had stopped because he knew Andy would not be part of anything so much against God’s word.

Later, he learned that his twin, Amos, had gone through
the same thing. They knew that Stutzman was mixed up from Ida’s death and that he had had problems in the past, but this kind of thing was totally forbidden. They were 15 years old, their sister was dead, and their brother-in-law had tried to have sex with them. How could they make sense of this?

“I wanted him to just leave me alone. I didn’t know what to do—I thought he was trying some homosexual things to me,” Andy later said.

July 11, 1978

The Gingeriches were held hostage by their emotions: the memory of Ida haunted them, as did Stutzman’s disturbing behavior. No one wanted to push or confront Stutzman. The Gingeriches were afraid that Stutzman was slipping into an abyss of madness.

Exactly one year to the day after Ida had died in the fire, the inevitable happened.

Susie was the first to notice that Eli and Danny had not been home that night. The buggy was missing and Stutzman’s bed had not been slept in. Stutzman had been acting so strangely lately, she was worried that something terrible had taken place. When he came home later that day, he went right up to his bedroom.

Later that afternoon, Andy Gingerich was tending livestock in the barn when he heard screams and scuffling sounds coming from the house. The next thing he knew, someone was running for the neighbor’s to telephone for help, shouting, “Call the emergency squad! Eli Ali’s gone mental!”

Upstairs in his bedroom, covered with a blanket and looking disheveled and wild, Stutzman was wavering between semiconsciousness and alert tirades.

“Where did you put the stones?” he demanded, pointing a finger at a bewildered and frightened little Danny.
“Where are the stones?”
He spoke loudly, his voice stern. He was sweating under the blanket, and his eyes rolled upward.

The Amish had gathered at the foot of the stairs, and
someone said that Stutzman had spent the night at the graveyard where Ida had been buried—or at least that he had babbled something of the sort.

When the emergency squad from Kidron arrived, the volunteer firemen heard howls and shouts from upstairs. Like a child, Stutzman was chanting the same thing over and over, starting and stopping without rhythm. The words were in Deutsch, and the firemen, although of Swiss extraction, couldn’t understand them—the Amish tongue is its own language.

The chant in fact had something to do with stones or a stone. Some of the Amish wondered if he meant Ida’s headstone.

The Stutzman farm was familiar to the squad members who had been there to fight the fire. When the Amish told them it was the exact anniversary of Ida’s death, it all made sense. The Eli Stutzman they had seen the year before had been emotionless, but now he was a raging animal. Maybe he had bottled everything up inside, trapping his emotions for the big explosion they were witnessing.

The men waited at the bottom of the stairs while the Amishmen filled them in on what had happened. They heard what sounded like a hurricane lamp crash to the floor, and more screams.

Fire Chief Mel Wyss led the squad. He grabbed a quilt, proceeded upstairs with his men, and threw the quilt over Stutzman as he thrashed on his bed.

Stutzman struggled to break free. He was so wild and strong that it took four men to hold him and bind his legs and arms for the drive to the psychiatric ward at Dover Hospital.

“Watch that he don’t bite,” a squad member warned.

On the way, Stutzman continued to struggle. At least once en route, the squad pulled over to tighten his arm straps. He continued screaming until they pulled into the hospital parking lot, when he seemed to calm. Perhaps he had worn himself out, or perhaps he knew that screams wouldn’t matter in a psychiatric ward.

Stutzman was admitted on July 11 and remained there for a full week.

The Amish community grieved for the disturbed young man. What if he did not pull out of this? What would happen to his little boy?

Twice the Gingeriches went to the hospital to visit Stutzman. Both times he seemed subdued, and afterward the Gingeriches felt he had not been happy to see them. They couldn’t understand why. They loved Ida, too. They understood his grief.

A week later, Stutzman returned to Moser Road. He was on medication, and he had appointments scheduled with the psychiatrist for follow-up sessions.

If the Amish wondered whether he was going to be all right, their answer came, in part, during the first church he attended after being discharged from Dover. After only an hour of preaching, Eli rose, picked up Danny, and left.

Andy Stutzman saw that his brother was slipping away and made numerous trips to Moser Road to try to help him. Sometimes he brought ice cream or watermelon, and a few times he even stayed overnight. One time Stutzman refused to take the tranquilizers. Dr. Lehman suggested it might help to dissolve the pills into Mountain Dew or 7-up. Andy followed the advice, and as long as Eli drank it all, it worked.

One morning, however, Stutzman seemed to have taken a turn for the worse. He sent Andy to a neighbor’s to call the doctor for more drugs. On his way back, Andy ran into Eli, who had left his bed and was walking quickly toward him.

“You’re not going to put me away again? You’re not going to sign me in to the mental hospital again?”

“No, Eli, I’m not going to sign you in unless you are mentally unaware and you don’t know how to take care of
yourself. Then I will have to. Do you understand?”

A week later, Stutzman started attending a Mennonite church. For the Amish, the pattern was all too obvious, and they were desperate to save him—and keep him Amish.

In an effort to help his brother, Chris Stutzman took Eli to Canistota, South Dakota, to the Ortman Clinic—a kind of chiropractic health spa that does considerable business with the Amish. Stutzman checked in on August 28, citing “sleep problems” as the reason.

He couldn’t get over his wife’s death, he told the admitting clerk.

He checked out on September 1. His brothers feared that the treatments hadn’t done much good.

“We could see he still wasn’t right,” Andy Stutzman said later.

One Sunday when Stutzman was away, Susie Gingerich discovered her sister’s suitcase. Something was inside and she became curious, but it was locked. She thought there might be some clothes that belonged to Ida that should be stored properly or given away.

Since she had the same kind of suitcase, she used her key. When she opened it she wished she hadn’t. She wasn’t sure what she saw—a radio or a cassette recorder. Whatever it was, it was against the
Ordnung
.

There was something else. Inside the recorder, Susie saw a wad of money. She didn’t count it, but there seemed to be a great deal of it. Why, she wondered, was the money in her sister’s suitcase?

When Stutzman returned home, Susie confessed what she had done. The troubled woman did not question him about what she had seen, but sought his forgiveness. She had violated their trust by looking someplace she should not have.

Stutzman forgave her and told her that the contents of the suitcase were things he had used to help ease the pain of Ida’s death.

Later, after Susie had told Amos what she had done and how sorry she was, Amos asked Stutzman about the suitcase.

“It was something I had in the hospital. It made me feel better, but I don’t listen to it anymore,” Stutzman said.

Amos Gingerich wondered if the whiskey he had found in the cooler fulfilled the same purpose—to make Eli Stutzman feel better.

December 12, 1978

Stutzman stopped in to see Elton Lehman at his office in Mount Eaton. He said that he was having trouble with church again and, in fact, that he hadn’t been to church in six weeks.

“The church hasn’t agreed on its problems, so we haven’t had communion for two years. I want to take communion,” he said.

Dr. Lehman felt sorry for the young man.

“He was so troubled and yet so spiritual. He wanted to have communion and he couldn’t. It didn’t seem fair to him. He was upset about it,” Lehman recalled later.

“My psychiatrist has told me to leave the church. I don’t know what I will do,” Stutzman told the doctor.

Just before Christmas, Stutzman called his cousin, Abe, and asked if he and Danny could come visit after the holidays. He also shared startling news. He had sold all of his dairy cows and was leaving the Amish. He also had a new job where he couldn’t take his son. Could he leave Danny with Abe for a couple of weeks? Abe said it would be fine, since his wife, Debbie, wasn’t working. Besides, their daughter April, now 7 months old, would enjoy a playmate.

When Abe hung up, he, too, felt sorry for Stutzman. Leaving the Amish again. It would be tough.

“But I never understood why he went back in the first place,” Abe Stutzman said later.

•    •    •

It was snowing when Abe picked Eli and Danny up at the bus station. Snowflakes stuck to the black fabric of their Amish clothes. It had been a long ride across the state to Greenville, which lay only ten miles from the Indiana border.

Immediately, Abe Stutzman decided that the towhead was the most mischievous and unmanageable little boy he’d ever seen—but only when Danny was around his father. Whenever Eli left the room the boy threw a small fit, but would calm down in a few minutes.

Stutzman stayed the night and told Abe and Debbie about his job training horses in Georgia, though he was going to take some vacation in Florida before his job started in March.

Abe asked why Stutzman didn’t take the child to his parents?

The Amishman bristled. “I can’t give him to them. They’ll take Danny away from me and hide him so that I could never find him.”

There was no reason to doubt his reply or even question him further. What he said seemed possible.

Before daylight the next morning, Stutzman and Abe left Danny asleep on the couch and drove back to the bus station.

“Get him a haircut and buy him some clothes. He’s going to need them.” Stutzman gave his cousin one hundred dollars.