The Farmhouse Down the Road

House for rent. English family welcome. $500 a month. Inquire Eli Hershberger, first lane past the schoolhouse. It gave the township road. It was a mile from Dad’s two houses, out where the town lots end and the farms begin.

I drove out there on my next day off. The farmhouse sat at the end of a short gravel lane, an older frame house with a wooden porch and steep wooden steps. Straight across the road stood the Hershbergers’ own place, a plain white two-story house with a tin roof and an old windmill beside it, the blades turning slow in the October wind.

Behind it stood a white barn, and a line of laundry snapped in the yard. Dark dresses, blue shirts, small black pants, all in a row from big to little. I counted twelve pairs of socks.

Eli Hershberger met me in his barn lane. He was a tall man with a long gray-shot beard and no mustache, the way Amish men wear it, and his hands were so rough that his handshake felt like gripping a fence post.

He told me the story plain. They had bought the farm across the road the spring before, for their oldest son, Levi, who was seventeen. Levi would farm it someday, when he married. That was years off yet.

The English family who sold it had left the electric hooked up and the propane furnace in.

Eli didn’t need the house standing empty, and he didn’t want it falling down. Five hundred a month, he said, and I would pay my own electric and propane.

“There is no washer,” he said. “There is a place for one. You bring your own.”

I told him I had one. He nodded and walked me through the rooms.

Wide pine floors, old wavy glass in the windows, a kitchen big enough to feed a threshing crew, and three bedrooms up a staircase so steep I had to hold the rail.

When we came back down to the porch, he asked me the only question he asked all afternoon.

“Your father has two houses in town,” he said. “Everybody knows Ned Roush’s houses. Why leave your father’s house?”

Of course he knew. In Holmes County everybody knows who owns what, Amish and English both. I thought about lying, and then I didn’t. I told him the whole thing, standing there on his porch with my car keys in my hand.

He listened without moving. When I finished, he looked off toward the road for a while, toward town, toward my dad’s place a mile away that you couldn’t see from there.

“A father’s house is a hard thing to leave,” he said finally. “Harder than people think. You come Saturday, if you still want to. We will shake on it then.”

That was the whole lease. A handshake, and a sheet of lined paper he wrote out later in pencil with the amount and the date, and my name spelled right the first time, which almost nobody manages.

The next morning, before I even got to work, Mary Hershberger walked across the road to the farmhouse while I was measuring the kitchen for my table.

She was small and quick, in a dark green dress and a black apron, with her white covering pinned neat over her hair.

She had a loaf of bread wrapped in a dish towel, still warm. And she had an offer she had clearly thought about all night.

“Your children,” she said. “When they come off the school bus, where do they go?”