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

inside the house to change clothes, I forgot I’d left four six-packs of Yuengling beer in the buggy. And I didn’t think to shut the buggy’s back end.
    My father saw the beer. He didn’t say anything. He just went over to the buggy and took the six-packs. When my friend and I got outside, I noticed the back of the buggy was open and the beer was gone.
    I said nothing, and neither did my father.
    A few months later, I found the empty cans between two rows of corn in the field, where he’d dumped them out. At least I think he dumped them out. He didn’t drink the beer, I’m sure of that. Another possibility is that he fed the beer to the cows. Beer is good for sick cows.
    I always understood that my parents didn’t want me to drink. I also understood that, at this time in my life, they were willing to give me the space to—mostly—figure these things out for myself. I remain grateful to my mom and dad for that. And to this day, I still don’t drink around my parents.
    M y Rumspringa friends and I, we didn’t always stay close to home. We went for long drives to places none of us had ever been before, exploring towns in Pennsylvania and into Ohio. We had a whole fleet of cars, from old beat-up junkers that English teenagerswould never be caught in to faster, flashier, newer models that somehow we ended up with. It didn’t matter to me, as long as it had tires instead of hooves. We hardly bothered with horse-and-buggies at all.
    We did all kinds of other stuff, too. Stuff that anyone who wasn’t Amish would have considered mundane. We played sports competitively. For the first time in our young lives, we had leagues for softball and flag football and played against teams from other youth groups. We didn’t have all the protective equipment that it takes to play tackle, but we sure loved flag football.
    I always needed money, even though I’d constantly taken on small pickup work since I was a child. I never felt like I had enough money. Some parents gave their kids spending money, but Dad didn’t believe in financing my Rumspringa fun. His idea was: “You don’t need money. You’re not spending it on the weekend. Your family gets the money. That’s how it is.” But I did need money, more than an Amish farmer with animals to feed and a family to raise could ever imagine. Now that I was getting out more, I had lots of things to buy. Fast food at the restaurants we hung out in. Little things at the mall that couldn’t be called essentials but were still nice to have. I started eyeing some jeans and T-shirts and cool pairs of sneakers. I told myself, “I might not want to dress Amish all the time.”
    All this meant I’d have to find some steadier part-time jobs, helping out in construction, building things for the neighbors near our house. But again, my father wasn’t letting me run completely wild. A lot of other kids in my youth group who had jobs got to keep the money they earned. But from my part-time jobs, my father always expected me to give him the checks—the whole checks. He might give me back 10 percent, but that didn’t leave much in my pocket. I was supposed to keep turning the checks over until I was twenty-one. At that rate, I knew I’d have to work an awful lot of part-time jobs or lots of full-time jobs just to make enough money to pay for all the new exciting things I was experiencing. So I found little ways to keep some of my money. When I got paid, I did give my father the checks. But every time I finished a job, I’d keep the last check for myself. Dad never thought to keep track of my start and end dates.
    Whether I was at home in Lebanon or in Lancaster with my uncles, I still went with my family to church most of the time unless I’d been out really late on Saturday night. But just because it was church day didn’t mean Rumspringa came to a grinding halt. Sunday afternoons, we played volleyball and drank some more. We still had singing. Every group, no matter how plain or