Life, and Death, and Giants

Gabriel¹ adopted Amish dress, attended Amish school, and sang hymns with a beautiful voice. But his body refused the community's devotion to humility. At ten he stood six foot six; at twelve, nearly seven feet and 255 pounds. Josiah⁶ raised doorframes, extended Gabriel's¹ bed to ten feet, and rebuilt the staircase.

A cobbler made oversized boots with removable toe-stoppers so each pair could last two years. Gabriel¹ lifted a three-hundred-pound ram on a dare, hoisted a year-old Belgian colt off the ground. He could block every volleyball shot without jumping.

The Amish children loved him, lining up for rides on his shoulders. But Josiah⁶ worried these spectacles bred pride, and tensions between husband and wife sharpened — Hannah² defending the boy, Josiah⁶ defending their faith, both fearing the approaching pull of Rumspringa.

Coach Trey Beathard⁵ — a recovering addict from Texas who'd lost everything before landing at Waushara High — was driving home when he saw something impossible in a distant field. An Amish boy was launching forty-pound hay bales twenty-five feet into the air with one arm.

The boy was Gabriel Fisher,¹ now over eight feet tall and four hundred pounds during his Rumspringa. Paired with Chinua Ngobo,¹² an adopted Burkinabè orphan who ran the forty in 4.23 seconds, the Fighting Hornets became unstoppable.

In a dramatic late-season game, trailing 20 – 14 with thirty-seven seconds left, Gabriel¹ took a handoff at tailback and bulldozed sixty-seven yards for the winning score, carrying defenders on his back like barnacles on a hull. The Hornets won the state championship, and Gabriel¹ committed to the University of Wisconsin.

At Wisconsin, everything overwhelmed Gabriel¹ — the campus, the classes, a roommate named Colt Bender¹⁹ who chewed tobacco and dragged him to house parties. At one such party, a tiny Mexican-American education major named Bella Alvarez¹⁰ pulled him onto the dance floor.

He accidentally punched through two ceiling tiles. They escaped outside, sat in the dewy grass by the lakeshore, and talked until dawn — about his Amish grandparents, his mother's death, Jasper's⁸ suicide. She cried and grabbed his arm. Neither wanted the sun to rise.

Before parting, Bella¹⁰ stood on a bench, cupped her hands over his enormous ears, pulled his face down to hers, and kissed him. Gabriel¹ emailed Thomas³ that the kiss was all he could think about. On the field, he was equally transcendent — setting weight room records and overpowering all-conference defenders as a starting freshman.

Sophomore year, Wisconsin was cruising undefeated, leading Ohio State 27 – 6 in the fourth quarter. On a counter play, Gabriel¹ planted his right leg to change direction, and three Buckeyes — a combined thousand pounds — exploded into his thigh and knee. His leg bent backward, shattering the knee brace into scattered plastic.

The stadium went silent. An ambulance couldn't fit him; a helicopter was summoned. Emergency surgeons discovered a torn popliteal artery — his lower leg had been starved of blood for hours. They amputated above the knee.

At a tearful news conference, the lead surgeon announced the amputation, then noted that advances in prosthetic technology would enable Gabriel¹ to walk again — well, as normal a life as an eight-foot-five-inch young man could manage. Billy Walton,⁴ watching alone from his empty tavern, felt his legs buckle beneath the bar.

Gabriel¹ returned home with his amputated leg but couldn't live without electricity, internet, or his cell phone. Hannah,² recognizing she couldn't provide what he needed, asked Thomas³ to take him in. Thomas³ modified his truck, helped Gabriel¹ master a prosthetic leg, and hired him as a veterinary assistant.

Gabriel¹ walked a mile a day, then longer, his cat Woolly Bugger striding beside him. But restlessness gnawed. A British wrestling promoter called with an offer: a hundred thousand dollars to train in London as Anakim, the Amish Giant.

Within months, Gabriel¹ was a global sensation, wrestling in Amish costume, lifting opponents overhead in his signature finishing move, swinging his detachable prosthetic leg like a baseball bat against villains. The Amish heritage he'd left behind had become his most profitable costume. Millions watched. His grandmother could not.

While Josiah⁶ was away working, Thomas³ took Hannah² to visit his mother's nursing home — Dorothy,¹¹ deep in dementia, spoke German with Hannah² and mistook her for Thomas's³ late wife. They drove south to Chicago. At the Art Institute, Hannah² nearly froze on the steps, terrified that beauty might corrupt her soul.

She entered anyway. For two hours she was transported: she fell to her knees before Zurbarán's life-sized crucified Christ. She wept before Monet's luminous stacks of wheat. Afterward she took Thomas's³ hand. Over deep-dish pizza, she tasted oregano for the first time — her father had banned all spices except salt.

That evening at the United Center, thousands of fans wore fake Amish hats. When Gabriel¹ entered carrying an angora ram in Amish costume, Hannah² wept with pride. When a masked attacker tore off his prosthetic leg, she fled in horror.

That same night, Hannah² returned home to discover her father Absalom's⁹ house engulfed in flames. She ran barefoot two miles to the nearest neighbors. Firefighters found his body in the bathtub, charred beyond recognition. Slid under Hannah's² door was an envelope in his shaky script.

Inside, a confession: he had sexually abused his own granddaughter Rachel,⁷ fathering both Jasper⁸ and Gabriel.¹ He had attempted the same with Hannah's² sister Meg,¹⁴ thwarted only by their mother's intervention. Meg¹⁴ fled to Pennsylvania to escape him. He set himself on fire as penance.

Rachel's⁷ lifelong refusal to name her children's father — the silence that cost her excommunication, her community, her life — was finally explained. She had been shielding herself from an unspeakable truth. Hannah's² childhood, built on a bedrock of piety, dissolved into a foundation of lies.

Hannah² shared Absalom's letter with her sister Meg,¹⁴ who admitted she had always suspected. Unable to learn whether Josiah⁶ had also known — he met her question with silence — Hannah² called Thomas³ and asked him to take her in. As his truck pulled away, the wind blew off her kapp.

She left it on the seat, pulled the pins from her hair, and let it stream behind her. At Thomas's³ home, she bought English clothes at a thrift store, slept eleven hours straight, and devoured books from his mother's library — all of Austen in January, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God in a single weeping night.

She and Thomas³ walked hand in hand through February thaws. She called this her second Rumspringa. But she told Thomas³ she would eventually return to Josiah.⁶ A pumpkin, her mother used to say, cannot be put back into its seed.

Gabriel¹ woke in a Spanish hotel room unable to see. Doctors in London found a grapefruit-sized tumor engulfing his pituitary gland, its branches strangling both optic nerves. The cancer had spread to his spine, lungs, and liver. Nothing could be done.

Gabriel¹ called Thomas³ from the tarmac at O'Hare, asking to come home. Back in Lakota, he grew too weak for daily walks but still loved sitting on the patio, feeling the sun and hearing birdsong.

Amish women — organized by Hannah's² friend Abiah¹³ — arrived in rotating shifts to care for him around the clock, washing his body, singing hymns, reading aloud from his childhood animal stories. Then Coach Beathard,⁵ remembering Gabriel's¹ anguished middle-of-the-night confession about Bella,¹⁰ searched the internet until dawn and found her in California.

Hannah² answered the door to find Bella Alvarez¹⁰ standing in the sunlight with a small suitcase and a toddler gripping her hand. The boy's name was Raphael.²¹ He was Gabriel's¹ son, about two years old, a miniature version of his father — the same dark features, the face Hannah² had also seen in Rachel.⁷

Gabriel¹ ran his hands over Raphael's²¹ little body, kissed him again and again. For days, his need for morphine lessened. He and Bella¹⁰ lay together talking for hours about everything they had lost and made.

Some afternoons, Raphael²¹ napped in the crook of his father's giant arm, the boy's tiny body nested against a chest wide enough for three children. When the pain returned and the morphine resumed, Bella¹⁰ joined the Amish women in caring for Gabriel,¹ seamlessly folded into a sisterhood of vigil.

Just before dawn on an August morning, Gabriel¹ began humming in his sleep — no recognizable melody, but musical, bright. Then came wings. Hundreds at first, then thousands: whip-poor-wills, owls, cranes, geese, cardinals, warblers. They sang in an orchestral wave, each voice finding its place.

From the woods came deer, raccoons, otters, skunks. Josiah⁶ insisted they wheel Gabriel's¹ bed outside. As the animal kingdom gathered, tens of thousands of fireflies descended, covering his body and bedframe in a blinding glow that forced everyone to close their eyes.

When the light rose and dispersed, Gabriel¹ was gone. Thomas³ walked slowly through the grass collecting fallen feathers — pheasant, crane, owl, mallard — and laid the most beautiful across Gabriel's¹ still chest. In reverent silence, the four of them watched the daylight arrive.

Gabriel¹ was buried beside Rachel⁷ and Jasper⁸ in a small cemetery beneath white oaks. At the funeral — hidden in a meadow behind a sign reading Fisher Barn Raising — Billy's⁴ friend Charlie¹⁷ read Housman's poem for an athlete dying young, reclusive turkey farmer Oliver Edwards²⁰ sang Amazing Grace in a voice like a church bell, and Billy⁴ told a joke that made even the Amish smile.

Hannah² embraced Thomas³ in a farewell that made her arms quiver, pressed her face to his chest, then stepped back. She pinned up her hair, pulled on her kapp, and rode home with Josiah⁶ under a crescent moon. Bella¹⁰ bought Thomas's³ house and stayed in Lakota with Raphael.²¹

Thomas³ scattered his mother's ashes in Lake Michigan and drove twelve hundred miles to a cabin on the Missouri River in Montana. That first evening home, Hannah² took Raphael²¹ outside to catch fireflies in a mason jar — just as Rachel⁷ had done as a girl, filling her bedroom with summer's captured glow.