Abandoned Prayers (3 page)

When Eli H. Stutzman was 18 years old his hand got caught in an antiquated sorghum press. Infection set in and he lost some fingers. He was fitted with a hook and thereafter was known as One-Hand Eli. Such a nickname is essential in a world with so many named Eli, Levi, and Amos and a proliferation of the last names Miller, Swartzentruber, and Yoder.

Stutzman married Susan Miller, and in exhausting succession that left her with a stooped back and a stretched belly, the Amishwoman bore him thirteen children. The fourth child, a son named Eli, was born on September 28, 1950.

Eli E. (to avoid confusion with his father, the family called him Eli Ali) was a bright child with a slight stutter. He showed an early interest in horses and a disdain for farm-work, and he enjoyed being the center of attention.

Said a cousin: “Eli always thought he was a little too good for the rest of us.”

School friends remembered Stutzman as a boy who could break the rules and convincingly place the blame elsewhere. By 6 or 7, it was apparent that the Amish boy was a habitual liar.

Years later, Susan Stutzman would clutch her hands to
her breast and shake her head. Try as she could, she could not find a reason why her son was untruthful. “If I could understand . . . he was always that way . . .” she said.

Once, Eli and his brother Andy played with a cart to which they had attached a small gasoline motor, taking turns riding the contraption down the hill by the barn. When the engine fell off and broke a pulley, they had to come up with a story for their father. It was Eli who covered it up.

“Eli learned how to lie then,” Andy later said.

When the boys hooked up a couple of heifers to the same little cart, their father found out about it and confronted them. Eli again came up with a tale. “I think he lied
too
good,” Andy said.

However, Eli’s father wasn’t fooled by the boy’s lies. Although the stories were detailed enough and told with great sincerity, the elder Stutzman saw them for what they were.

One-Hand Eli was a minister in his church district. He had been chosen by lot, as the Amish have done for centuries. (Copies of the
Ausbund
are arranged on a table. Selected men each choose a hymnal, one of which contains a slip of paper with a verse. The man who gets the piece of paper is the one they believe God has chosen to preach His word.)

A small, gray-haired man whose hair was just a bit longer than that of some of his neighbors, the senior Stutzman held great faith and unyielding belief in the old ways. He would not accept any misbehavior by his children. A whipping was his swiftest and most effective remedy for disobedience.

As a father, he had a responsibility to ensure that his children followed the
Ordnung
. As a minister, he was under tremendous pressure to see that his children, more so than others, toed the line.

His problem was the son named for him, a bright but rebellious boy who had an eye for horses, money, and the modern world. At home or at school, Eli Ali found new ways to get into trouble. The incidents were small at first,
but grew with age. The more his father held him down, the more he tried to break away.

A neighbor of the Stutzmans remembered the young Eli: “He didn’t seem to work as hard as the others when we were out in the field or at a husking. Eli didn’t feel well or he had some excuse—or his mind was on something else.”

As the boy grew toward manhood, it seemed the Amish neighbor was right.

The Dog House, a rundown little Wayne County beer joint, was a popular hangout for Amish boys going through
rumspringa
, the equivalent of sowing wild oats. The fun was generally harmless—a couple of beers and a few laughs at the ways of the old folks. Young Eli Stutzman belonged to the Wild Westerns, a group of rowdy Amish youths who frequented the Dog House.

The boys in Stutzman’s circle souped up their buggies with decals and bumper stickers. Radios were tucked out of view and country music blared from inside. Sometimes pranks were played. Buggies were torn up or trashed in a pond or a field. Once Eli stole a boy’s bicycle. Mostly, it was done in fun.

However, Stutzman, whom many considered popular, later told friends that there were times when he had been treated as an outcast by some members of the Order. “Some boys who didn’t like me hung a dead, skinned cat in my buggy,” he claimed, although he had thrown out the carcass before anyone else saw it. “I don’t know why they didn’t like me,” he added.

Rumspringa
is also the time of dating, and the Amish girls liked Eli Stutzman—especially his eyes, which were as blue as new denim. He was small and slim, standing about five feet six inches and weighing 140 pounds. Dressed in his white shirt, black coat, and broadfall pants, he was perfectly proportioned—compact and solid. His brown hair hung over his ears in the kind of severe Prince Valiant that was the cut of the Swartzentruber Order. His
wild and rebellious streak was his biggest plus. For the Amish, who value and insist on conformity, Eli Stutzman was fun to be around. He was different from the others.

Among the higher Amish, bundling, the courtship custom of an unmarried couple’s occupying a bed without undressing, was seen as an archaic and dangerous invitation far too tempting for young people. The Swartzentrubers, however, held tight to the tradition, but not without a price. Out-of-wedlock pregnancies occurred occasionally. After all, birth control was not only against the Bible, it was in violation of the
Ordnung
.

Gossip among the Swartzentrubers frequently targeted girls who bundled “too hard.” If such talk could be substantiated, the girl’s dating was curtailed and monitored by her parents.

Amish adolescents learn little about sex from their parents, and there is no Amish school program to give even basic information. The teenagers learn by watching farm animals and by asking those whom they trust. Occasionally, boys get their hands on forbidden men’s magazines.

Amish parents supervise “singings” for the youth. These co-ed gatherings take place in barns and include Amish songs and food. Sometimes they are wilder than that, with Amish boys smuggling in beer and transistor radios.

It was at a singing that Eli Stutzman met 16-year-old Ida Gingerich. For Ida, the attraction was immediate. She got the feeling, she later told her sister, that Stutzman liked her, too.

The daughter of Amos and Lizzie Gingerich, Ida was a beautiful girl with wide-set hazel eyes. When she laughed, dimples creased her cheeks. Her ash-blond hair was thick, with a slight wave—but no one outside her family knew that. She wore it like all the other Swartzentruber girls—rolled under, pulled back, and tucked under a bonnet. It was written in the Bible that only her husband could see the glory of her hair. And for Ida, that could only be Eli Stutzman.

The Gingeriches, like the Stutzmans, were Swartzentrubers,
although they lived in a different church district. The Gingeriches were a warmer family, with great concern for one another. It wasn’t that the Stutzmans didn’t love one another—they simply didn’t show it.

Eli and Ida dated for the next four years. Everyone assumed that after they joined the church—a requirement for marriage among the Amish—they would marry. It was Ida who first confessed her sins and knelt before the church to join the Swartzentrubers. Stutzman followed her baptism with his own.

In the fall of 1971 Stutzman, who only had a standard eighth-grade education, began work as a teacher at the one-room Maple Grove School.

Although neighbors believed that One-Hand Eli was pleased with his son’s growth into adulthood—he was a member of the church, and he had a steady girl and a job as a schoolteacher—word came out that unease and rebellion continued at the Stutzman farm. Many who knew the family wondered why the minister couldn’t control his son. Some felt that the minister was not sufficiently loving to his boy and was too harsh a disciplinarian.

When Eli was 21, he moved from his parents’ farm to a farm across the road, run by an Old Order Amishman named Mose Keim. Keim, whose church was less restrictive than the conservative Swartzentrubers’, knew that Stutzman had had some trouble at home.

Keim and his wife, Ada, wanted to help, but neither wanted to be embroiled in the middle of Stutzman family trouble. “Everyone liked Eli,” Keim said later. “We didn’t know how he was going to turn out.”

Soon word got out that Stutzman had gone to the school board for a raise. He told Keim he hadn’t named a figure, but he felt he needed more than the $140 a month he claimed he was earning. He also told Keim that his father thought he was trying to become more worldly by asking for more money.

“The truth was, I feel, that his father could no longer control his son,” Keim said later. “But he still wanted to show who was boss.”

Another neighbor shared similar feelings years later. “Old Eli tried to have his son’s salary go directly to him, instead of to his boy. That is not any way for a father to be. Eli was 21 and should have been allowed his own money.”

One-Hand Eli visited his son several times at Keim’s, each time telling him he was wrong to leave home and must return immediately. The young man refused. He told Keim that his father had even gone to the school board to see that the raise was not given.

For young Stutzman, the pressure was too much. On February 12, 1972, he collapsed, without warning, as he was on his way to his upstairs bedroom to dress for a Saturday-night date with Ida Gingerich.

For Mennonite osteopath Elton Lehman, the tiny Ohio village of Mount Eaton was the perfect location for a family practice. There, although it was only a half-hour drive from Canton, he could still be a country doctor—the kind who knew all his patients’ and their children’s names and said hello in passing.

When the Amish needed a doctor, they made the trip to town and tied their horses to the clinic’s hitching post. For patients too ill to travel, Dr. Lehman still made house calls. Even so, the doctor was often the last resort. Wary of modern medicine, the Swartzentrubers frequently employed home remedies before seeking the doctor’s opinion.

Dr. Lehman had grown used to the Amish and their abrupt ways. The men dressed in black and white seldom said thank you. The women almost never spoke. Sometimes bare feet tracked mud and farm debris into his tidy office on Chestnut Street. But none of that mattered, since the Amish paid cash and on time. And they trusted him. A few Amish patients had even invited the doctor and his wife
into their homes for dinner—a true indication of acceptance.

Dr. Lehman had heard the rumors about Eli Stutzman and his mental problems, so he was not surprised when he was summoned to Keim’s farm that Saturday night. He found Stutzman in bed upstairs in a depressed and nervous state.

One-Hand Eli was there also, looking troubled and concerned. “My son is having more nerve problems. He is out of control,” the senior Stutzman said in a hushed, concerned voice. “I don’t know what to do to help him.”

Young Eli remained in bed until Sunday evening, seeming to drift in and out of consciousness. Although his father had wanted him returned to his farm, Dr. Lehman recommended that he stay put until his condition improved.

As the weeks passed, Keim doubted that Stutzman would recover; his nerves seemed shot. He called in a woman who did foot reflexology, a technique some Amish favor over traditional medicine. The woman gasped when she tried to work on Stutzman’s feet. “They are so sore, I cannot touch them. There is nothing I can do,” she said.

Keim next took Stutzman to chiropractor Morton Bissell in Brewster, Ohio. Bissell showed the Amishman how his nerve pressure had tightened the “plates of his skull and caused them to shift abnormally.” He prescribed some pills and arranged for a number of treatments.

At his Apple Creek farm, Keim did what he could do to help, at times even bathing the man. When he massaged his neck, it felt as taut and rigid as 8-gauge wire. He wondered how Stutzman could survive with such tense muscles and nerves.

But there was more. One day shortly after the collapse on the stairs, Keim found Stutzman crying in the barn. When he asked him what was wrong, Stutzman told him that ever since the breakdown he had had a constant erection that was both painful and embarrassing. Keim didn’t know what to do to help the young man. He considered
asking Dr. Lehman about it, but dismissed it as too private a matter.

“It seemed to go on for months,” Keim later recalled. “Somehow that breakdown affected his sex.”

It was at about that time that Keim and his wife discovered several notes that Stutzman had written on scraps of paper and left in his bedroom. The words, written in English, included references to Satan and Hell. Keim and his wife wondered if he had left them for their benefit, and if so, why?

One morning Keim found Stutzman downstairs, dressed and standing in the kitchen, his long Swartzentruber hair cut shorter and crudely. This was particularly disturbing to the farmer. “Eli, what in the world did you do to yourself?” Keim asked.

Stutzman ignored the question and said he wanted to go to Keim’s church. That was fine with Keim, yet still he wondered why Stutzman hadn’t had someone else cut his hair.

Next, Stutzman had his Swartzentruber-style buggy outfitted with a more sophisticated dash than the conservative Swartzentrubers permitted.

Even though Stutzman never went across the road to tell his family what he was up to, his father got wind of the changes.

The rumors ran wildly through the Amish community. Word was out that trouble still plagued the Stutzman family on Welty Road.

While out on the house call three months before, Dr. Lehman had seen that the young man was a time bomb waiting to explode, so it was no real surprise when One-Hand Eli came to his office for help in mid-May 1972.

The Amishman’s concern was obvious and, to the doctor, seemed genuine.

“My son is no better,” the old man said. “What can I do to control him?”

Dr. Lehman weighed the solutions. He told the Amishman that he could call Fallsview Hospital in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. If his son would go for treatment voluntarily, arrangements could be made quickly.