PULASKI, PA. Strong foundation helps Amish family to rebuild

A reporter observed the goodness of people from various walks of life who eased a family's tragedy.
By CHARLES M. MADIGAN
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
MERCER, Pa. -- The Monday-morning coffee drinkers in the restaurant at Red Ryder's Ryder Motel were guessing when the hard-working Amish and their "English" friends would finish the new house for Rudy and Lizzie Wengerd. The workers had started digging the foundation just that morning.
Red called Neal Miller into the conversation. Neal is an uncharacteristically talkative and vastly engaging Old Order Amish man who runs a bridle-and-leather-goods store near the intersection of state Routes 208 and 18 in Pulaski Township in Lawrence County.
He sipped his coffee, gazed out under the black brim of his hat and made his pronouncement.
"They'll be living in it by the end of the week," he said.
He had worked on these house-raising crews, he said. It is not unusual for the Amish to go from a piece of ground to a framed-out home with roof shingles in 24 hours. That is what happens when 100 people who know exactly what they are doing show up at a building site.
As it turned out, Miller was wrong, but not because the house wasn't completed -- it had a shingled roof, windows and doors just 36 hours after the first dirt was shifted for the foundation.
But Rudy, 37, and Lizzie, 36, are still living with relatives because their biggest loss in the fire that destroyed their home Dec. 3 had nothing to do with property.
Rudy's brother Neal wrote it down in a letter that is so full of heartbreak it is difficult to read even for the 10th time. It starts with a list of the children who survived and the children who died. Rudy and Lizzie had nine children when they went to bed that cold Tuesday night, and only four a day later.
The deaths
Katie, 14; Levi, 12; Neil, 11; John, 4; and Jonathan, 2; died in the fire. The other children -- Anna, 16; Gideon, 15; Dannie, 9; and Emma, 6 -- suffered smoke inhalation, but Rudy and Lizzie were able to get them out of the house before it was engulfed by flames. They came out of the burning house in their underwear, and that was all they had left after the fire.
Good things and bad things often live in the same neighborhood at exactly the same time. The sadness of the loss called out goodness in all kinds of people.
People here just shake their heads when asked about that fire.
Some of them, including an old Amish man who sells handmade baskets from his farmhouse, cannot mention the children without weeping. "I just can't think of it," he said. "I would never sleep again, for children to die like that."
The children are buried under what looks from a distance to be a big oak tree on the side of a pasture just off Cotton Road.
Huge funeral
The funeral was Dec. 7. Hundreds of Old Order Amish and a handful of their English friends showed up.
Because the Old Order Amish pray only at home, they were all packed into two houses and a work shed nearby.
The men and the women sat on long benches in separate areas. When the Amish bishop walked in, the men, in unison, took off their black, broad-brimmed hats and put them on their laps. The ceremony, the sermon, all the words were in German, the preferred language of the Pennsylvania Dutch.
The English who attended -- anyone who is not Amish in this area is called "English" -- said it was the saddest thing they had ever seen, even though they didn't understand a word of the language they were hearing.
The five coffins were placed in five rough wood boxes, and the children were buried beside one another in a single grave.
You cannot see the grave from the spot on Route 208, where the men started showing up at dawn Dec. 9. It is over a knoll and down a dirt lane. The foundation of the house that burned sat on this spot, but only for a day or so. The Amish men moved in immediately after the fire and cleaned every square inch of the space.
You could not tell on the morning of Dec. 9 that there had been a fire.
Teamwork
They parked their buggies at the next farm down the road and walked to the site, all of them dressed in blue coveralls and each wearing a leather tool belt that carried the only equipment they would need when the actual building began: a hammer, other hand tools, some nails.
The English showed up, too, and not in small number.
They brought the heavy equipment. The front-end shovel, the bulldozer, the little digging machine that scuttled around the site like a gas-powered animal, a generator, power saws, and lots of coffee and doughnuts.
Working from plans in their heads, the Amish rushed around the site for hours, meticulously measuring and labeling every piece of wood needed for the first stage of the project, the construction of concrete forms.
Then the English made the cuts with power tools. After that, the Amish collected the wood and stacked it neatly where it was needed.
By midmorning, about 100 people were working at the site, the vast number of them Amish. The progress was remarkable. By the end of the day, a cinder-block foundation, resting on a 24-inch-deep concrete footer, was in place for the 20-by-30-foot house and the wood storage building behind it.
The Amish have no phones, no conventional means of communication. How did they all know when and where to show up? Some of them had come from Indiana and Ohio.
Neal Miller said there is a network. They work the pay phones at nearby stores, using the Mennonite directory to call friends, family, acquaintances, believers, all over the place.
Then everyone shows up.
Why?
"It is what we do," Miller said.
It's the same with any disaster. They come to help, always.
The costs
It costs a lot of money to build this kind of house, even without wiring, which the Amish will have none of.
Ron Wilson, part owner of Wilson Lumber and Building Materials down the road in New Wilmington, Pa., said the house will not cost the Wengerds anything because everything, from the labor to the hundredweights of nails, has been donated.
Before the first shovel of dirt was moved, 90 percent of the house was paid for. On top of that, a trust fund was opened at a local bank, and there are boxes full of contributions arriving each day.
Red Ryder said people who have no idea where to send things are just dropping stuff off at his motel -- canned food, toys.
Red's wife, Jan, put a jar on the counter by the cash register with "Contributions for the Wengerd Family" written on it. She expected spare change. People started stuffing $20 bills into the jar.
It was very cold the night of Dec. 9 and the morning of Dec. 10, but at dawn, the workers were back, along with an almost continuous stream of big trucks from Wilson Lumber and other suppliers.
By 8:30 a.m., the floor supports were in place.
The first floor was completed by the time 120 Amish workers and a dozen or so non-Amish broke for lunch.
A memory for plans
All of this was accomplished without even the hint of a blueprint or plans.
Seth, an Amish master builder, was in charge, and beneath him were two assistants, and beneath them were three assistants each, and everyone else reported to those guys. All big questions made their way to Seth. The rest, people just knew what to do. There were no disputes.
A plan had been presented to the Wengerds a few days after the fire. They said OK. Then the plan was tossed in a corner someplace, and the Amish showed up and did what they have done a thousand times, building a big wood house with six bedrooms upstairs. It will be heated by a wood- and coal-burning stove on the first floor, with another stove in the basement to heat water for washing.
By dawn Dec. 11, smoke was coming from the chimney, and windows were installed.
Sad answers
Because some TV people had become aggressive covering the funeral, the Amish were wary of reporters. If they aren't interested in talking, it is like asking questions of a tree. They are never unkind or rude; they just don't play along.
But once they start talking, the Amish are engaging, eloquent and completely frank about answering questions. The story is sadder than the surface facts would indicate.
"Rudy, he has been up against it all of his life," said one man who knows the Wengerd family.
"He is the hardest-working person there is. He moved from town out to that farm in August because, with all of those kids, he thought it would be good for them to live in the country and work a farm."
The "from town" was Pulaski, Pa., a little village down the road where Rudy and his family lived on the side of a hill, not good for farming at all. They moved out to the house on Route 208 in August, even though the place had been owned by an English person who had installed wiring and plumbing.
Rudy, who was a livestock boss at the auction in Mercer, and Lizzie, who sold baked goods at the farmers markets, were working hard to get the house back to its simple Amish roots when it was destroyed by fire.
Reality has robbed everyone here, Amish and English alike, of any potential for a happy ending.
Neal Wengerd went out of his way at midweek to make certain everyone knew how much the family appreciated all of the help. He especially thanked the volunteer firefighters, and said no one ever gives them enough attention, although the work they do to help people is so important.
He made that little speech at the Mercer Livestock Auction, where he worked with Rudy.
Not a fancy or eloquent man, Neal wanted to say something that would let everyone know how important it was to help one another, how valuable that is for everyone, those who help and those who are helped.
So he told a very short and very private story.
When the firefighters found the remains of Katie, the oldest girl killed, she had the baby Jonathan in her arms, he said.