Like his own father before him, Russ’s father was the pastor of the church in Lesser Hebron. Unlike other men in the community, he wore a long, collarless coat that buttoned at the neck. In the parlor of the family’s house in town was a cabinet containing birth and marriage records, minutes of Anabaptist councils from more disputatious eras, and genealogies stretching back to Europe. Small groups of men could be found in the parlor at all hours of the day, conferring with his father and courteously accepting slices of his mother’s pies. There seemed to be no limit to their patience in maintaining their apartness, their nonconforming obedience to the Word. A dispute between neighbors or a fine point of worship could occupy them for weeks before his father effected a reconciliation.
Blessed are the peacemakers: Russ was proud of his father but afraid of his seriousness, his forbidding coat, the sober male voices in the parlor. He preferred the kitchen and felt closer to God there. His mother worked fourteen and sixteen hours a day, placid in her plain dress and her hair covering. According to Scripture, earthly life was but a moment, but the moment seemed spacious when he was with her. In the time it took her to listen, actively, with clearhearted questions, to one story he had to tell from school or the farm, she could make dough for a pie crust and roll it out, core and slice apples, and assemble a pie. And then, neither pausing nor rushing, she was on to the next chore. She made emulating Christ seem effortlessly rewarding. It horrified Russ to think that, four hundred years earlier, a person so quietly devout might have been put to death; it filled him with pity for the martyrs.
His other favorite place was the blacksmith shop of his mother’s father, his Opa Clement, whose work included the repair of automobiles and tractors. Clement showed Russ how to hold a glowing horseshoe with tongs, how to use tin snips to fashion cookie cutters （a Christmas present for Russ’s mother in 1936）， how to rebuild a carburetor, how to hammer out a dented wheel and check its roundness with calipers. Clement’s wife had died before Russ was born, and although he had his daughter’s meditative way of working, her limpid rightness with the things around him, he’d become eccentric in his solitude. He subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post, neglected his shaving and bathing, and sometimes omitted to worship with his brethren. At the end of an afternoon when Russ had helped him, he reached into the pocket of his pinstripe overalls, removed a fistful of money, and invited Russ to choose, from his blackened hand, any coin that had silver in it. Even as a teenager, Russ was too innocently devout to spend the money only on himself. It was unthinkable not to get his mother something, a package of gingersnaps, a bottle of peppermint extract.
Except for rendering taxes unto the government, as Jesus had sensibly advised, the community was quietly but firmly anti-state. They schooled their children separately, avoided polling places and courts of law, and declined to swear on the Bible if called as witnesses. Most central to their identity was their pacifism. On few points was the Gospel clearer than on the incompatibility of violence with love. As the community’s pastor, in 1917, Russ’s paternal grandfather had contended, on the one hand, with the anger and prejudice of non-Mennonite farmers—rocks thrown through windows of the Kaiser-lovers, a barn defaced with ugly words—and, on the other, with families in his congregation who’d permitted their sons to go to war. Two of the families eventually quit the community.
Russ was seventeen when the country entered the Second World War. He would have been obliged to lodge an objection of conscience sooner if the president of the local draft board hadn’t grown up on a farm adjoining the Niedermayers’。 Cal Sanborn liked and admired the Mennonites and did everything he could to protect their sons. Russ was among the last to be called up, in 1944, and by then he’d completed five semesters at Goshen College. He’d also had his first crisis of faith, not in Jesus Christ but in his parents.
He’d enjoyed his classes at Goshen, but his only close friend was likewise the son of a pastor. In his ungainly tallness, as in the seriousness he’d inherited from his father, he felt uncomfortable with the earthier and more athletic boys, especially when their talk turned to girls. His father had told him that there would be girls at the college, and that he shouldn’t shy from fellowship with them, but Russ couldn’t look at a girl without thinking of his mother. Even to return a girl’s friendly smile was somehow to offend against the person he most loved and revered; it made him queasy. The cure was to take a walk of five or ten miles, in the country around the college, until his body was exhausted and his soul open to grace.