Amish Confidential

Amish Confidential by Lebanon" Levi Stoltzfus Read Free Book Online Page A

Book: Amish Confidential by Lebanon" Levi Stoltzfus Read Free Book Online
Authors: Lebanon" Levi Stoltzfus
I liked the way that sounded immediately. It was from those guys that I got the nickname I still carry around, Lebanon Levi. I was the guy from Lebanon County. They had so many Levis and Johns and Rubens, theyneeded some way to tell everyone apart. If you’re John from Perry County, you’re Perry John. As soon as I got there, I was Lebanon Levi. Everything was faster in Lancaster, including the nicknames.
    The new crowd was way more fun than the plain kids in Lebanon County. Now Saturday night, which I used to think of as just the night before Sunday, was key to the Rumspringa equation for me and the other Souvenirs. Saturdays were for partying. Wintertime, we’d all get together in a shop or in a barn where there was heat. Summertime, we had our parties in pastures, meadows and open fields. It was always great having parties outside. A lot of kids, boys and girls, were trying cigarettes. So outside was a lot less smoky. We had alcohol too, lots of alcohol. Someone would make a punch and pour different kinds of booze in there. Sometimes, we had bands playing late into the night. That might not seem like a big deal, but except for maybe a harmonica that can be stashed away in a pocket, most Amish people don’t play instruments at home or at church. A lot of bishops see playing music as a form of self-expression, and they don’t mean that as a compliment. You won’t ever hear an organ at Amish Sunday service. Amish sing a lot of hymns, but usually without so much as a pump organ playing along.
    So to us, having a band play seemed exciting and slightly taboo. Of course, that made me want to start a band immediately. Lancaster Souvenir parties were filled with people dancing and carrying on. The girls were way friendlier and way more fun than any I’d met in Lebanon. Some of them would actually talk to boys, even someone like seventeen-year-old me, who could be loud and rowdy around his guy friends and suddenly tongue-tied in the presence of a girl.
    Lebanon was a long buggy ride from Lancaster on a late Saturday night. I spent a lot of time with my friends’ families or staying atone of my sisters’ houses. But parents have special radar, and the distance gave me only so much insulation. My parents had heard about these wilder youth groups, and now they were keeping a particular eye on me. My father kept asking me, “How was youth group? What did you do with your friends?” I always gave the vaguest answers possible.
    “Not much. Just talked. Hung around.”
    “Did you enjoy yourself?” he asked.
    “Yes, sir,” I said, without offering any further details.
    Somehow, my mother knew I was drinking. I couldn’t figure out how she knew. Maybe the other mothers were gossiping at church on Sunday. Or maybe it was something sneakier than that.
    “Were you drinking over the weekend?” she asked more than once.
    “No,” I insisted.
    “I know you were.”
    “Okay, whatever.”
    We’d been through this ritual several times already.
    One Sunday morning when I was still half-asleep, I heard my mother walk upstairs and into my bedroom. I know it wasn’t Monday because my head hurt from drinking so much. There aren’t a lot of rules that kids follow about getting drunk, but one I always tried to follow was, “Do your big drinking on Saturday night.” Plenty of Amish kids wake up Sunday mornings and say, “Damn, I’ll never drink again—or at least not today!” That morning, before my mother told me it was time to wake up, she bent down and put her nose an inch from my mouth. I didn’t know what she was doing. I held my eyes closed tight and tried not to breathe. She stayed like that another moment until I had to exhale. Then shestood up, and I heard her satisfied sigh. She’d been smelling my breath all along.
    Ah , I thought. So that’s how she knew I’d been drinking!
    My father had his own, quiet way of addressing the subject of alcohol. One Sunday, I stopped at the house with a friend. While we went

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