The Truth About the Amish

photo by N. Bourne

This horse is dead. He worked hard every day of his life and when his owner thought he could do  better with a new horse, he hauled this Belgian to New Holland, Pennsylvania, and sold him directly to slaughter. It didn’t matter if there was someone at the auction looking for a draft horse, or a rescue wanting to give him well-earned pasture rest– this horse never made it to the sale ring. Instead, they slapped a white USDA sticker with a bar code to his back and sealed his fate.

What became of this gentle giant, bound for slaughter?  If he was lucky, he went Canada, where he  was killed with a captive bolt or .22 bullet before butchering. (Because he was a large fellow, and apparently sound, and because the Canadian customs demand it, it’s likely that all the horses on that trip arrived at their final destination in reasonable condition. )

For the horses whose luck has truly run out,  they are shipped 2000 miles to a Mexican slaughter-house. Shipped in mixed lots, some are dead on arrival, or sick, or badly injured. Some abattoirs there do have a captive bolt gun, it fires a mechanical rod into the brain, instead of a bullet.  But the method most often used is a small Puntilla knife. Lisa Sandberg, in a 2007 story for the Houston Chronicle, noted that it is a point of pride to be able to drop the horse with one quick stab that severs the spinal cord. But too often, as on the day she was there, the Apuñalador is inept:  she watched as a roan mare was stabbed 13 times along the back before she fell. The horses are then hoisted into the air by a rear leg, paralyzed but still alive, their throats are cut and they bleed to death.

When equine slaughter facilities were closed in this country, the number of horses shipped across the US border to Mexico increased more than 300 percent.

Knowing this, it’s hard not to support the return of equine slaughter to the United States. I’d much prefer it if there was no need or demand for horses to be killed for their meat. Yes, they are livestock, but our relationship with horses is more complicated than that. If we could mandate and insure a dignified and humane death for each horse by legalizing and stringently regulating slaughter in our own country, and closing the door for export to Mexico– then we could at least stop that part of the nightmare.

But right now, that’s what the future held for this big gelding: a trip to Canada, or one to Mexico– with no possible chance of reprieve. No one could save him, because the seller decided to get a guaranteed price (perhaps less) by selling directly to the kill buyer than taking their chances in the auction ring.  Who does that to their horses? Who steals from them their very, very last chance?

The Amish, that’s who.

It’s not just plow horses the Amish consign to this terrible fate every single Monday all year long. It’s their buggy horses too, Saddlebreds, Standardbreds, Morgans. Often underweight, scarred by ill-fitting harness, lame from something awful, or just lame from a stone bruise.  Frequently their forelocks have been shaved, so as not to cause the farmer inconvenience with the overcheck bridle– never mind that the forelock is invaluable in aiding the horse’s comfort in fly season. They bring in a horse whose stamina is falling off, or one that can’t go so fast anymore, trotting mile after mile on pavement. No point in feeding an animal that can’t pull its own weight, and theirs as well.  (New Holland sells other kinds of livestock too– pigs and sheep and cattle.  Notable among these were some Amish-owned Holsteins, their udders swollen as big as medicine balls, dragging on the ground between their legs.)

Outside the auction house, all day long, Amish buggy horses stand tethered on pavement. They have no water. Often the check rein (which keeps the horse’s head up) is left fastened. They are still in traces, bearing the weight of the buggy shafts. All day they stand like this, and then stiff and miserable, are expected to trot briskly home in the failing light. When they are too old, or too tired, or used up they will be discarded here and sent directly to slaughter.

Oh, the bucolic simple life of the Amish! How charming the plain folk, the tidy farms, the children in straw hats and dark bonnets, the hard-working, the humble and the meek. What a load of hogwash. You want adjectives for the Amish? What about shrewd, selfish, oppressive, and cruel?

In 2006, Charles Carl Roberts IV, took ten Amish schoolgirls, age 6 to 13, hostage in their school in Nickel Mines, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. He let all of the adults and the boys leave the school, and then shot all of the girls and himself. Five of the girls survived. The Amish community made national headlines by declaring their immediate and complete forgiveness of the gunman and support for his family. One can’t help but wonder if they’d have been so quick to turn the other cheek if it had been their sons who had been lined up and executed.

Donald Kraybill, a scholar of Amish life (who went on to sell his book about the atrocity, Amish Grace : How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy to Lifetime Television for a made-for-tv movie) said the Amish willingness to forgo vengeance “does not undo the tragedy or pardon the wrong, but rather constitutes a first step toward a future that is more hopeful.”  The Amish have made “forgiveness” part of their stock in trade.

I haven’t forgiven Elmer Zimmerman.

Elmer Zimmerman is an Amish farmer, also in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. He and his brother Ammon operated a large commercial dog breeding operation. During a state inspection of the kennel by the Pennsylvania State Bureau of Dog Law Enforcement in July 2008,  the two brothers were cited for extreme heat, insufficient bedding and wire kennel floors that the dogs’ feet could fall through. In addition they were instructed to have 39 dogs examined and treated for fly bites and flea infestation. The brothers chose not to comply with the state’s recommendations. Instead they shot and killed 80 dogs. 80 dogs that died without a name, without a kind word, without a comforting hand. 80 dogs that died terrified.

“The decision by commercial breeders to kill healthy dogs instead of paying to repair a kennel and seek veterinary care is alarming and will likely outrage many people,” state Secretary of Agriculture Dennis Wolff commented.  “Until our state’s outdated dog law is changed, kennel owners may continue to kill their dogs for any reason they see fit, even if it is simply to save money.”  (Pennsylvania HB 2525 which had been in the works at the time of the Zimmerman’s rampage, was passed in October 2008, requiring that dogs may only be euthanized by a veterinarian.)

In Lancaster county alone, there are more than 300 commercial dog breeders, some of them with more than 500 dogs, and the great majority of them are Amish-owned. Up until November 2009, when then Governor Ed Rendell signed into law new anti-cruelty measures, Amish-owned breeding dogs were subject to primitive de-barking by having a metal rod shoved down their throats, often breaking the jaw and lower teeth in the process.  Farmers were docking tails and cutting off dewclaws when puppies were several weeks old. Ears were being cropped with kitchen shears. Caesareans were being performed on whelping bitches without benefit of anesthesia or sedation.

While the rights of responsible individuals to breed dogs should be protected and supported, no one has the right to subject dogs to neglect, abuse and outright torture.

The Amish are not educated beyond the 8th grade. They are entirely patriarchal. They sell the “product” of “Amishness” but it is false. Despite their evident piety, they choose to ignore the teachings of Jesus that aren’t convenient to their lifestyle. Do they not see themselves in Proverbs 12:10?  ”A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast; but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.”

Lancaster, Pennsylvania, areas of Ohio, Indiana and fifteen other states with a significant Amish population see a fair amount of income from Amish-related tourism. There is often an implied, if not an explicit reluctance to tarnish the image of the noble, gentle, Plain Folk. Law enforcement may turn a blind eye to a victim that goes to great effort to report a crime in the community. (One girl’s mother had all of her daughter’s teeth pulled out after the girl used a neighbor’s telephone to contact a battered women’s shelter to tell them she was being raped by her brothers.) State departments of education allow for the Amish to stop attending school at age 13. The Amish are expected to police themselves, but their system of crime and punishment is like something out of Alice in Wonderland. The accused confesses and is forgiven, the victim is punished.

The Amish are a cult. But because they are picturesque and we are nostalgic for earlier, simpler times, we not only accept their eccentricities, we celebrate them. We buy their faceless dolls, their dark quilts, their cheese and chairs. We buy their myth.

It doesn’t take much looking to find one account after another as to how cruel the Amish are to their children, their cash crop of puppies, their exhausted, broken, beaten and fearful horses. How an animal is treated is surely the measure of a man, and it’s not surprising that the problems in the Amish community extend to child abuse, battered wives, rape and incest.  (An extensive article in the January 2005 issue of Legal Affairs describes those problems in chilling and absolutely sickening detail. ) Isn’t this what you might expect though, from men who condemn their loyal servant  to a terrible death in exchange for a few hundred dollars?  Surely no less is to be expected from someone who denies them that one last tender mercy.

For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same. As one dies so dies the other; indeed, they all have the same breath and there is no advantage for man over beast, for all is vanity. Ecclesiastes 3:19

BABY TONY IN HEAVEN

Even with the air-conditioning going full blast, the truck is hot and the drive along I-20 out of northern Louisiana monotonous. It’s the end of Labor day weekend, and evacuees from the gulf coast are traveling north to escape Hurricane Gustav. When I left the motel in Monroe, a number of families have already set up camp in the parking lot.

We turn north out of Vicksburg on Highway 61. It runs along the Mississippi river from New Orleans to Minnesota. From the 1920s through the fifties, it was an important trail for blacks leaving the deep south for better prospects in Chicago.  The New York Times‘ music critic Robert Shelton wrote: “Jazz came up the river. Blues came up the river. A lot of great basic American culture came right up that highway and up that river.”

We went up  Highway 61 as far as Greenville, noting the first legal liquor store in Mississippi (the Jigger and Jug Package Store, which opened in 1966) and stopping for a hamburger. We’re on the west side of Greenville now, so we just meander over to State Highway 1, heading north through miles of cotton fields and sleepy little towns like Rosedale, Gunnison, Alligator.

Just north of Round Lake, a roadside shrine catches my attention. There is a life-size painted plywood silhouette of a little boy waving, and a little red chair. In the ten seconds it takes me to decide to stop, I’ve traveled another 800 feet. I find a place to turn the truck around.

“What’s going on,” my 13-year-old son asks sleepily, awakened by the change in momentum.

“Nothing, I just want to look at something.” He sighs and closes his eyes again. The roadside memorial consists of a large cross, a couple of concrete angels, the little red chair painted with the words “Baby Tony,” a hand-lettered sign that says “Pray for My Mama” and about a hundred red and white bicycle reflectors.

I am interested in roadside shrines. It seems strange to say that I admire them, given that they are landmarks to someone’s heartbreak, but the impulse to erect them feels entirely right to me. One mother said that she felt closer to her daughter on the narrow median strip where the girl died than in the cemetery where her body was laid to rest. “This is where her spirit left this earth,” she explained, and that is explanation enough.

My husband has no patience for such things. He is a champion of getting from point a to point b in the most efficient way possible and we would never stop, let alone turn around and go back for a pile of stuff on the side of the road. But when I am traveling alone (or with my kid) I often stop. I’ve photographed dozens of them, but the results are always flat. The energy that’s there can’t be captured by the camera, I suppose. I go on trying, though and I am composing a photo when an SUV stops alongside the truck.

A woman gets out of the vehicle and hurries towards me. There’s a twinge of anxiety– have I trespassed? Have I done something to offend?

“Hello! Hello!” she calls. “This is my grandson’s shrine, Baby Tony. I made this for him.”  She is standing in front of me now, a woman in late middle-age, her salt and pepper hair pulled off her face into a tidy bun, still in her denim dress and flat shoes from church this morning. “I am so glad you stopped!”

We chat a little about the shrine, and she asks if I have time to come back to her house for a minute. It would be easy to say no, I really have to get on the road. It would be prudent to say no, wouldn’t it? My husband would be stunned that I would even consider saying yes. But she looks so hopeful I find myself saying “Sure, you lead the way.”

Baby Tony’s grandmother’s home is a tidy one-story house I’d passed a mile or so back.  Other than the marquee in the neighbor’s yard (“Have you robbed God? You robbed him of tithes and offerings. Repent for Grace”) it seems entirely unremarkable.

“Come this way,” she says, “I want to show you something.” She sounds quite urgent and I hurry after her around the side of the house. There, in a grove of trees is a trampoline and around the trampoline are dozens and dozens of red tricycles.

“After Baby Tony died,” she says, “people just started bringing them to me.”  There are  67 tricycles arranged  one after the other in a large rectangle. Some face left, others face right. There’s no significance to the number, Janice says. Sometimes there are more, sometimes there are less. When she’s been given a particularly nice tricycle, she has passed it on to a child that didn’t have a trike. “That’s the way Baby Tony would have wanted it.”

One of the tricycles is cream-colored and quite old; the others are all red and white in various states of repair. Some are entirely covered in rust. An orphaned tricycle tire hangs on the handlebar of a neighboring trike. Her daughter and grandson had been over to the house the night before the accident, she tells me. Baby Tony was three years old.

“I was sitting in my chair and he was sitting in my lap. He was such a sweet little boy. His mama said to him, ‘Come on Baby Tony, we got to get home to make some supper for your Daddy.’  He leaned up next to me like this and he said “Gramma, I’m going to see God tomorrow.’ I just didn’t know what to say to that, but my hair just raised up like this on my neck, see. When Baby Tony and my daughter were about to go out the door, he ran over and held his arms up for me to pick him up. When I did he put his little arms around my neck and he said ‘Pray for my Mama.’”

And on the next day, there was an accident. Just a single car, just a little ways up the road. Her daughter drifted to one side, overcorrected, left the road, and rolled. She spent weeks in the hospital, but Baby Tony was killed immediately. The first tricycle was there in Janice’s yard when she got home from the hospital that night.

It wasn’t every day, but at least every week, that another tricycle would appear. Some old, some brand new. She knows the details about some of the trikes, but others are more obscure, arriving in the night, or when she is away. She started lining them up along the edge of her yard, and as the line grew, she had to turn a corner and then again, until the never-ending parade of tricycles was complete.

“It’s very peaceful out here,” she says. “And if I feel sad, I come out here and it feels like Baby Tony is still with me.” She excuses herself and goes into the house, returning a few minutes later with a much-larger-than-life painting of a little boy in a Hawaiian shirt. He looks like an old soul, I think. “This is Baby Tony!,” she says, and her voice is full of joy.

I’m astonished to see that I’ve been there for an hour, and I still have to get on up the road to Memphis. I give her my address and promise to send her a copy of the photograph of she and Tony in the garden of tricycles.

“Oh, please. Wait just a minute,” she says and runs into the house. When she returns she puts a golden pear in my hand. It’s heavy– plaster, I think. “You are supposed to have this,” she says. Pears– the symbol of motherhood and immortality. I thank her for the pear and for taking the time  to tell me about Baby Tony.

“Oh no,” she says, “thank you. Thank you so much for stopping.”

I climb into the truck, waving at her as I back out into the road.

“What was all that about?” my son asks, awake now. We are passing the spot where Baby Tony left this earth and I explain that the lady was the little boy’s grandmother. “Oh, that’s so sad,” my son says. He picks up the pear. “I can’t eat this, can I?”

“No, it’s not real.” If I didn’t have the photographs, it might all have been a dream.

LET EVERY BELL RING

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,

The faithless coldness of the times;

Ring out, ring out thy mournful rhymes,

But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Last Christmas was the very worst one ever. I couldn’t quite figure it out. There had been Christmases past that were poorer, lonelier, more bizarre. There was the year I knocked over a 100-year-old Chinese man with my mother’s cast-off Chevy Citation. (He lived.) Or that first Christmas in Montana when I only knew six people and none of them invited me over. Though I had no decorations, I picked up a bedraggled fir tree from an abandoned lot on Christmas eve (the sign said free) and set it up in a bucket of water in my apartment, festooning it with snowflakes cut from typing paper. Or that Christmas six years ago, when my father slipped away from us, unmooring me in ways I could not even fathom.

But since then there have been holidays full of joy, surprise, and adventure. I’d reclaimed the holiday I love best. I only had to look back through the photographs of grinning children, exquisite lights, Christmas cupcakes to remember.

But not last year. I went through the motions. My mother came to visit. I made cookies for friends and neighbors. We had a lovely tree and nice presents and the whole time I just felt dead inside. I did not keep Christmas in my heart. Hell, I couldn’t find it with both hands. I was as cold inside as icy rain. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t snap out of it. No matter what I did to kindle it, there was simply no joy.  When the season blessedly shuddered to a stop, it was with relief that I packed away each ornament, every strand of lights, the singing reindeer. I couldn’t wait to be done.

This autumn they seemed to be cranking up Christmas even sooner. I understand that with the economy teetering that merchants must wring every penny they can out of holiday shoppers. I understand that for many this is what keeps their doors open the rest of the year. But still, I resented Christmas rushing in before Halloween pumpkins had even been carved, let alone extinguished. The sight of people skipping autumn for glitter and tinsel foretold that grim drumbeat. I muttered and grumbled about the commercialization of the holiday until the  middle of November, when I turned up the Christmas music on the radio and gave in.

I am determined to make this Christmas different. I can’t survive another one like last year.

I’ve started really looking at decorations, not just seeing them. Santa perched atop a Columbus, OH candy factory, a life-size nativity scene, or a crazy mess of mismatched twinkling lights and plastic reindeer that still manage to look beautiful glowing in the night. I’m humming along to every schmaltzy Christmas song on the radio. (Except for “Home for the Holidays,” I still can’t stand that one. I said to my son the other night that Frank Sinatra must have stopped mid-phrase during recording and said “What is this slop?”) If I’m alone in the car, I’ll actually sing.  I took a donation to the soup kitchen around the corner, along with three bags of children’s books, because they said they needed them.  Though I have a dozen rolls of wrapping paper left from previous years, I bought some new rolls, and threw the old wrinkled stuff away.

There’s been a particular kind of pleasure in finding gifts. Not extravagant gifts perhaps, or even particularly expensive ones, but the sort of thing that one might open on Christmas morning  feeling surprise and delight. (And if one doesn’t, one should keep it to one’s self. And no, I’m not going to tell one where I got it so one can return it for cash.) When we were first married I was so taken with having a ready-made family of a husband and his two young daughters that I produced literally a small mountain of gifts for them. If they weren’t overwhelmed by the sheer number of presents, which took days to open, they were certainly stifled by my insistence that everyone take turns to open their gifts. That was a tradition in my childhood, but I think I must have terrified the girls, who had only previously known the rip-and-shred model.

They didn’t get what they wanted either. The daughter (with the word processor she’d asked for) eyed with naked envy her sister’s American Girl doll. The worst flop though was Jingle, the Welsh pony mare that I bought for my younger stepdaughter, who was horse-crazy. Except that somehow I’d failed to notice that the horses she was crazy for were the ones in her story books and lining her shelves. She didn’t really want a real pony– that was probably my leftover Christmas fantasy– and the cocktail of her dismay and my disappointment made for a grim time.

My husband is a wonderful man in many ways, but gift-giving is not one of them. The first year we were married he went to Wal-Mart on Christmas Eve and bought a huge stack of  well, stuff. A copy of National Enquirer, a polyester nightgown four sizes too big, a colander, a VHS movie we’d already bought a few weeks before.  Last year, when pressed, he came up with one thing, a grape-colored cotton turtleneck. I’ve tried a general list of things he might choose from. I’ve tried a specific list of the very thing I wanted and that didn’t work either. After nearly two decades, I’ve given up. He is a generous man at heart and I can help him choose. Surprise is highly overrated anyway.

I know some people get really hung up on what they get from their spouse, which may explain why Lexus has the audacity to suggest that you might not screw it up if you give your wife a $40,000 car. My old friend Kate spent every Christmas and birthday in tears because her husband Jeff  had screwed it up again. Though I never said it, I often wished she’d just cut him a break. If the only way you can validate your marriage is by the measure of what swell gifts you’ve been given, that’s a little pathetic.  I did once love a man who gave quite magical gifts. The only problem is that he was a total narcissistic ass. Once I told him that I thought it would be wonderful to have the last words of James Joyce’s Ulysses (“Yes, I said. Yes, I will. Yes.”) engraved on the inside of a wedding ring. That Christmas he gave me that very sentiment embroidered on a  . . . wait for it . . . bath towel.

Which reminds me of the Christmas that my mother really wanted a guitar and my father gave her a recorder. My father got better at Christmas, even though for most of my life “Christmas with my father” was represented by an enormous cardboard carton of gifts that arrived one day in December. My parents divorced when I was 10 and my mother and I moved to England. That Christmas the carton contained the boxed set of George Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass,” and all manner of other stuff one might send across the Atlantic ocean to your only child. Over the years the box contained a transistor radio, ice skates, horse books, cashmere sweaters, a Sony Walkman, a check for a Thoroughbred mare.  One year it held the wedding ring my mother had given him in 1960. I wore it on the middle finger of my left hand for fifteen years– until the day I married my husband and now he wears it.

In November of every year, my father would ask me for a list of what I wanted for Christmas. Over the years, with the addition of husband and stepchildren and our son, the lists became more elaborate, and I looked forward to making them. It wasn’t a matter of asking for something I wanted– though that was part of it. It was more like drafting a road map to Larkinland, full of clues and ciphers. It didn’t always work, because we are human, but it had its magic.  My mother would interject here, a little archly, that it did not make for much magic for the rest of my actual real-life family who sat around for hours watching me unwrap the things my father sent.

Then one Christmas Dad died. I don’t know if he hung on until the 26th on purpose or if it just worked out that way. It didn’t matter. We had been with him through the 17th, and went home to Montana because Julian was supposed to be in a school play and we expected Dad to live through January. The Doctors said he would. Was there a Christmas that year? I don’t remember. I’m sure we did something for Julian and his sisters. I remember that I absolutely could not stomach the idea of killing a living tree for something as superficial as Christmas, so we put up a little tree made of tinsel. When the call came on St. Stephen’s Day that he wasn’t going to make it, I couldn’t get to Missouri in time. The one flight was leaving in 40  minutes from an airport 120  miles away, and as it happened, even if I’d been on the plane I wouldn’t have made it in time.

I didn’t get over it. Yes, there had been holidays ”full of joy, surprise, and adventure.” I’d struggled for those, reaching up through a deep sea of melancholy.  But my grief stained so many things I’d loved about Christmas. And there was never another cardboard carton full of oddly shaped gifts wrapped with too much tape and witty clues written in Dad’s angular hand about the mysteries within.

The thing is that his death was really the last straw. My stepfather, HCB– the man who taught me to drive, gave me my first pony, my first pair of earrings, my first Martini– had died unexpectedly far, far away seven years before. When people die halfway round the world, it never feels like they’re really dead. They just feel gone. Though he’d never given me a cardboard carton full of stuff I thought I wanted, he’d given me self-confidence, determination, the art of debate, a well-honed sense of social justice and a trial run in grief. Christmas with HCB meant a houseful of people, a joint of  beef, the town brass-band playing “My Old Kentucky Home” in the kitchen, and the kind of gift you never knew you wanted because you did not know that it existed. And the very last time I saw him was at Christmastime, just before he went back to England, three years before he died. He and my mother came out to Montana to see us, and our brand new baby boy. He slipped me a hundred-dollar bill over dinner on Christmas eve. I had no pockets, so he suggested that I fold it up and put in my shoe.  He had long discussions with three-month-old Julian. He exclaimed over the square spot on the back of our hound dog. He sang bawdy English songs and Christmas carols and got on an airplane and went away forever.

Over Thanksgiving this year, a friend wrote that she’d enjoyed the best holiday she’d had in years, going out to NASA with a friend. She said that she’d felt down on every holiday since 1995 when her father died. 16 years.  A pet psychic once told me that my father  (in heaven,presumably) was so distressed by  my sadness– and that my dog was consumed by my grief, which the dog couldn’t  comprehend or understand. How large did I need this to be written?  It is, was, is time to get on with things.

So we go pick out a Christmas tree, one that touches the ceiling. I’m not sure I’d ever bring myself to cut down another tree, but when they’re standing outside the grocery store, they’re somewhat past saving. I’ve commandeered the guest room (which smells oddly like fruitcake– could that be a ghost?) for wrapping presents. I’m filling up a cardboard carton full of stuff for (as HCB would say) my “chosen” daughter and her children– that’s what he called me. Not his stepdaughter, but his chosen daughter, like he’d plucked me off a tree, or out of a lineup.

There are menus to be planned, Christmas cards to be written, school programs, carillon concerts, a trip to see the University of Dayton’s huge collection of crèches, even though I’ve seen them all twice before. There are photographs to take, of family and Christmas lights and friends, and scores of dogs with Santa Claus, a fundraiser for dog rescue. I think this is the year that we will turn our collection of plastic milk jugs into luminaria ringing the edges of the property.

I have learned something from my sorrow. Last Christmas was my fork in the road. I am not going to mourn for years to come. I choose life! I choose happiness. I am going to dance and sing (sometimes out loud even) and remember all the joy and sorrow in the past and look forward to both sweetness and tears in the days ahead. Let all the bells ring!  I am going to celebrate Christmas, falling open armed into the light.

RED FLAGS

It’s hard to say exactly when I realized that things didn’t seem quite right.  I’ve known this man for more than eight years, but it’s a friendship built mostly on email exchange and the very occasional telephone call. Still, you pick up a sense of people’s habits, their routines, the way they approach the world.

This is a delicate matter, and I don’t want to cause undue embarrassment, so let’s just call  him “Dave.” We all know a million Daves, right? He’s a member of the last grown-up generation. He is well-educated, eclectic but well-informed in his tastes and opinions.  Compassionate and perhaps just a bit quirky, with a great love for dogs and sailboats and literature. Oh, and wine, he’s a great fan of good wine and can be quite a bore about it. (Sorry, Dave.)

Long before the entrenchment of Facebook in our lives, people with common interests used to communicate through internet forums, and it was in such a place that we met Dave, over our mutually beloved breed of dog. That sounds convivial enough, doesn’t it?  What’s remarkable is the kind of cesspool of backstabbing, jealousy and aggression these chat-rooms become. Factions form up, it’s almost like high school, where Mean Girls rule.

A frequent visitor to the same forum was a sweet, deeply Christian woman we’ll call “Nancy.” Nancy raised this breed of dog too, and had for nearly twenty years. She lived in a very, very remote place and would share the challenges of life there, with all of its triumphs and griefs. We all offered our heartfelt sympathies when she reported that one of her very favorite dogs “got sick” and she had to shoot it with a pistol, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that we were pretty disturbed too.

I confess I didn’t have much patience for her. We lived in a remote place too and I didn’t once find myself having to shoot my own dog. But reading her posts was like trying to swallow dollops of treacle, as she laid on her Christian faith with a cement trowel. She and Dave became fast friends, though their relationship was confined to long phone calls, as they lived on opposite edges of the continent.

Who can understand the attraction that one person has for another?  Past a certain age, physical appearance drops down the scale in importance, but common interests and companionship and mutual appreciation count for a lot. Nancy didn’t strike me as an intellectual wunderkind, but perhaps that was my own prejudice and distaste for her religious fervor. Anyway, Dave found reason to foster their friendship, and beyond that it really was none of my business.

Then a year ago Dave’s Facebook status (because of course, we’ve all fallen into that vortex now) changed from “Single” to “In a relationship” and as jaw-dropping as it was to some of us, Dave had moved Nancy (and her dogs, and her elderly horse) more than 4000 miles to his house.  Well, you know what they say, love is strange. I knew that Dave had been lonely, and I’m sure he must have believed he was offering Nancy a chance at a real life, a release from her struggle in the bush. Maybe this would work for them, and that would be wonderful.

Then Dave’s Facebook page disappeared. I mentioned its deletion in a tax-day email to him that was otherwise about sailboats.

“Nancy felt threatened by the Facebook account, so I deleted it, along with most of Yahoo,” he wrote. Later, Dave confided that Nancy had written a woman with whom he had a friendship of forty years duration and asked the woman not to contact Dave again. It wasn’t then that the little bell began to ring, I only remember feeling very sad. Not sad for Dave, particularly. He’s a grown man and can well make his wishes known, I thought.  No, I felt sorry for Nancy, because I know what it’s like to be in the grips of gut-wrenching insecurity, to see nearly every female as a likely threat to my happiness and well-being.

That was the story of my first marriage and what a misery it was. Poor old Bob wasn’t even doing anything wrong, though he had lots of women friends. I was the problem. I didn’t truly believe that I was loved, and so I doubted him at every turn. I was very sorry to see that Nancy was stricken with this lack of faith in herself, and in Dave. It’s one thing to wrangle these feelings in college, another thing altogether when you and your partner are in the September of your lives, with plenty of past behind you, a collection of friends and old lovers, and a wide variety of interests. How can you hope to circumscribe the full life of another into such a tiny little box?

Then I had an email from Nancy, with a photo from a subdivision entrance that shares my name. “Dave and I get such a kick out of this every time we pass it we think of you.”  The next email message I had from Nancy asked me not to call Dave anymore. This struck me as really peculiar, because in the many years I’ve known Dave, I’ve probably spoken to him on the telephone a dozen times, and mostly he’s called me. Why would she think I’d been calling him and why would she ask me to stop?

“Some partners are very insecure,” Dave wrote. “Since dropping out of Facebook to keep the peace here, I no longer have any way of keeping in touch with all the activities of many friends, some of which communicate by no other way.”

Now the bell was beginning to ring. Then Dave broke his hip falling backwards down the stairs. Then he got food poisoning so severe it landed him in the hospital.  And a second time. Nancy wrote me again citing things I’d said in emails five or six years ago. She complained at length about the relationships he tried to have with other women. The alarm bells were ringing, a cacophony in my head now. Red flags were running up the shrouds.  She told me that if I didn’t support their relationship that I was no longer welcome to contact him.

So I didn’t. I called social services in that mid-Atlantic state instead and talked to a social worker about elder abuse. The National Center on Elder Abuse estimates that over a million older Americans are subject to abuse each year, but caution that the figure could be much higher, as most instances go unreported.  Because of the shortage of reports, there are fewer than fifty peer-reviewed studies on elder abuse, and we rely largely on educated guesses as to numbers and frequency and situation. The American Psychological Association puts the figure at more than double that of the NCEA, believing that more than two million are victims, and their findings indicate that most incidents do not happen in a nursing home. Instead, people are victims of members of their family, caregivers and other individuals in the household. And it isn’t just the infirm at risk.

I spoke with a social worker at length. I explained that Nancy was driving away Dave’s old friends. I explained that although Dave was nearing seventy that he was very active, and not too long ago was running marathons. I pointed out that in the eight years I’d known him he had not been ill or incapacitated in that entire period of time as much as he had been in the last year. I said “Maybe it’s nothing, but this concerns me.” She thanked me for calling and said they’d get back to me in the next few days.

Two months went by. There was a telephone message from Dave, he thought a keystroke logger had been installed on the computer to track the sites he visited and the people he contacted. There was an email message, purportedly from Dave that read “I’m fine, thanks to you! Love ya, Dave.”  Dave is about the last person in the world that I would expect to sign off an email “Love ya!” But Nancy isn’t.

Nancy is not my Facebook friend. Hell, she’s not my friend in any realm. All that sanctimonious treacle, I couldn’t stand it. But 23 of my “friends” are “friends” of hers, and through them I see the photographs of her life there alongside Dave. I’d estimate there are approximately 100 photographs of  my old friend. He is not looking at the camera in a single one of them. In some, he lies on the floor with a dog or two, his hands over his head, as if to shield himself.  My husband urges me to call social services again.

“They must not have found anything,” I tell him. “They said they’d call back, and they never have.” But I am worried and he is too.

And then the letter comes. I have to read it twice, three times to really grasp what’s written.

“In the course of our investigation, we have discovered a preponderance of evidence that (Dave) is in need of protective assistance and we will be making our services available to him.”

A preponderance of evidence. Not just evidence, but a preponderance of it.

It horrifies me, it really does. I am relieved that I made the call, but I am very sad that my awful fears are confirmed.

Some people will read this and they will recognize the characters and they will be outraged that I have written about poor, sweet Nancy this way. Some people will read this and wonder if they should make the call about a situation they’re aware of. Do it. You don’t have to know for certain that abuse is taking place. That’s for a social worker somewhere to determine. But if you think someone you know is in danger, or is suffering, don’t let it go.

I have no doubt that Nancy herself will read this, because it will be pointed out to her, and I don’t care. I want Nancy to know that I know, that we know what kind of person she is under that thin shell of sugar. I want Nancy to know that if something happens to Dave that she will be suspect. I know Nancy thinks she’s landed on Easy Street and that what belongs to Dave might one day belong to her, if she can only control him long enough.

And I have a message for Dave. Dear friend, you’ve earned whatever happiness life gives you, but sometimes capitulation is not worth the false sense of peace you get in return. However you curtail your social nature, it will never be enough for someone so insecure. You might be furious that I’ve left your laundry flapping in the breeze like this. I wouldn’t blame you. We love you anyway, and if you need us, please call.