Plain People: Amish Short Stories

By Talton Weber

Plain, Plain and nine other award-winning short stories reveal a unique peek of Amish underworld plain living as never before. Talton Weber lived among 4,300 Amish of northeast Ohio for twenty-five years and was privy to their unique religious ways, and these revealing short stories use fiction to document their trials of coping with such a rigid lifestyle within the settlements. The characters of Plain People are modern-day grotesques: rebellious Amish boys and girls whose forbidden activities fly in the face of stifling religious doctrines, overpowering and demanding district bishops who threaten to shun members at the slightest deviation, fractured marriages where divorce is the ultimate sin, isolated suffering individuals who try to inject modern methods into Old Order ways, and those who fall in love with the Amish and yank overnever to return to their former modern lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543451870

Talton Weber

Talton Weber was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1955. He graduated from the University of Wyoming in 1979 with a degree in English/Journalism Education. Weber taught and coached at Cody High School, Casper Natrona County High School and Dublin Coffman High School in Dublin, Ohio and then worked at Taylor Publishing Company of Dallas, Texas. For three years he was a factory firearms rep/professional shooter for Beretta USA. For the last 18 years he was been the owner of Gunrunner Auctions of Cody, Wyoming and Burton, Ohio. Weber enjoys hunting, fishing, trapping, hiking and serves on the Cody School Board. Weber lives on a ranch outside Yellowstone National Park on the North Fork in Wapiti, Wyoming.

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 by Scott Talton Weber.

Library of Congress Control Number:         2017914324

ISBN:                      Hardcover                        978-1-5434-5185-6

                                Softcover                          978-1-5434-5186-3

                                eBook                                978-1-5434-5187-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 09/22/2017

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CONTENTS

Foreword

A Barn Burning

Plain, Plain

In The Quag

The Reunion Of My Former Self

Three Foxes

Native Son

The Cornfield

The Amish Lizard King

The Booth

Letters To My Son

Acknowledgements

FOREWORD

Notes on the stories:

Plain, Plain was originally published in GQ Magazine and was the winner of the $5000 Frederick Exley Short Story contest.

Plain, Plain appeared in the Japanese GQ Magazine in a slightly different form and was entitled The Material Girls.

Three Foxes originally appeared in Story Magazine in a slightly different form.

The Reunion of My Former Self won the Mark Twain Writing Contest for short story.

In The Quag won the Ernest Hemingway Festival Days writing contest in Key West for short story.

Plain, Plain won the Ohio Writer’s Conference short story award.

Plain, Plain received a fiction award and $5000 grant from the Ohio Arts Council.

Native Son received a fiction award and $5000 grant from the Ohio Arts Council.

Plain, Plain was optioned by Paramount Studios as a film concept/script written by the author and director Jonathan Segal.

DEDICATION

To my father Chi Weber who was the first to believe; and to the Plain People of Northeast Ohio who continue to be a daily inspiration

A BARN BURNING

T HE BOY WAS dressed in all black and came at night up through Bishop Trapp’s dry creek bottom. He paused for a moment and got his breathing under control and shifted the heavy pack that contained the bladder of gasoline. A dog sounded off on one of the farms down below and he heard a peacock shrieking, Help! Heeellpp! At the Deitweiller farm a guinea cried out and then fell silent. The boy pulled at the heavy black pants that were his father’s worn out Sunday clothes and he reached down and tightened his belt and then pulled the old black waistcoat tight across his bare chest. His hands and face were darkened with stove black, his hair tucked under a black felt hat. If he stood extremely still in the ravine it was impossible to see him. He liked it that way. No one could get at him during the night. The elders were not there to judge him, the other Amish boys could not make sport with him. At night he felt power that he did not feel in the day.

The creek bottom passed 100 yards behind Bishop Trapp’s big bank barn and here the boy paused before he left the cover of the trees. He slung the pack off his shoulders and drew out two large pieces of leather and fastened these around the bottoms of his boots and tied them with old shoe laces. He put the pack back on and walked through the rows of corn and across the old lane behind the barn. He stood at the side of the barn and listened. Bishop Trapp’s big Belgiums stomped their feet on the concrete and the boy felt the side of the barn give a bit when one itched itself on a barn stud right next to him.

The boy went to the corner of the barn and looked at the house. It was dark. He knew the Bishop’s schedule well, he’d milked for him for two years until the falling out. The big disagreement - the admonishment in front of the church - his congregation! Damn that Bishop! This would show him of his mistake. Tonight would even the score!

It would be four more hours before the Bishop and his sons would come out to milk their 52 head. The boy chuckled to himself as he thought about that. He saw the two Border Collies, just humps of black and white, asleep on the porch. A couple of chickens squawked up in the hen house and then were quiet. A few cows shifted in the barn. One blew out its nostrils.

He went to the back door of the barn and went in by the horse stalls on the bottom level. The tack was neatly hung by the entrance, he could see the rows of ointment, hoof dressing, thrush treatments and fly dope. The boy pulled his arm out of the pack sling and removed the bladder. He flung the pack into a dark corner.

He held the bladder away from his body, loosened the knob and squirted a stream of it onto the stacks of straw in front of the draft horses. The Belgiums smelled it and snorted and the ones that were laying down got up and shook their chains and stomped their feet. The boy threw more gasoline on the track doors and then went across the bottom level to the cows. He threw his gasoline on the wooden feed troughs and the dry feed bins and up along the old wooden beams that Bishop Trapp’s father had hand hued from the ash trees out back with hand tools.

He run upstairs and poured gasoline on the wooden hay racks and along the tool benches and in circular patterns on the dry wood floor. With only half a bladder left, he climbed the mow ladders and threw the rest of the gasoline on the dry hay – a crop that Bishop Trapp and the boys had just finished bringing in. He chucked the empty bladder among the bales.

And then the boy did an odd thing. He raised his hands high as if in reverence and looked up to the highest window of the mow. On the peak of the wall, up near the apex of the roof was a tiny star that had been cut out of the lathing. This star shown brightly and a little moonlight came through there and cast a star down into the darkness of the barn’s inner wall. The boy’s eyes followed that beam of light and for a moment he was silent and then crossed over to the star on the wall and tried to hide it with his hands, but it merely shined on the back of his fists. He turned and then broke out in a hideous laugh. When he was finished, he brought the match to the book’s striker and flicked it with his index finger. There was a woosh and the dry hay - hay from one of the driest summers ever recorded in Geatoa County - hay that would constitute the only cutting of the hot summer - ignited like gunpowder and before the boy was back down the mow ladder, the fire was now climbing the barn walls like a caged snake.

The boy felt a surge of adrenaline as he ran through the barn igniting the other pools and soaks of gasoline. The horses surged against their chains and pushed against each other, but there was no chance they would go anywhere. They knew the stall meant safety and that was where they would stay until the smoke and flames got them.

For a while the boy stood and watched the barn ignite. The flames seemed to mesmerize him and he again raised his arms to them. Soon the smoke drove him away and he went out the back door and jogged through the corn until he again came to the ravine. He ran back through the dry creek bed until he came out on the top of the neighbor’s hay field and he paused.

Smoke was coming going high into the night from Bishop Trapp’s barn and some red flame could be seen which meant the walls were going. Although over half a mile away he could hear the horses’ last shrieking and the cows distress cry deep in their throats. Lights were coming on now along the Amish valley and he could hear shouts.

The boy went back to the crick bottom and found a pool of water and washed the soot off his face and hands and chest. Nearby he had hidden his regular clothes. He stripped in the moonlight and stuck the old black clothes and old hat way up under the creek bank in an old muskrat den. He dressed and stole along the fence row until he came out onto the dirt road. When Eli Goostophan and his boys came by in their wagon, the boy flagged them down and caught a ride down to help fight the fire.

PLAIN, PLAIN

T HE AMISH GIRLS are up in my bath room.

Can’t I see them now? Giggling and putting makeup on each other, feathering out their eye lashes with black goo until they droop like barbed wire, pattering on too much blush until their cheeks looked afire - and that glaring nail polish that is the color of slaughter blood. Oooh, they like that best! Standing naked they take turns stepping forward and planting a red kiss on my frosty mirror (for me to see later).

Can’t I imagine the thrill when they first ran up there, leaving me alone on the couch with my beer, the stereo blaring with Pearl Jam (they picked the CD because the lead singer had nice hair) and the glee on their faces as they reached under my bed and drew out their little gym bags (the ones with the lime and orange day-glow material that they ordered from the mountaineering catalog) with all their Calvin Klein and Estee Lauder perfumes and face paint and mascara and mousse and conditioners and oils and stuff they bought through catalogs and had sent over the last few months to my address - stuff from Fredrick’s of Hollywood and Victoria Secrets and SAKS and CW - all so they could look like the nice models they’d seen in my Vanity Fairs and Interviews.

Yes, and now and then I hear a shriek over the stereo noise and I know they’re going through my stuff - through my closets and drawers - touching the close stitching of my Ralph Lauren shirts, running their fingers along the synchilla pile of my Patagonia and Marmot mountain jackets, caressing the slickness of my surf shirts and the silk linings of my British suits - so different and exotic from the coarse fabric their mothers unroll and snip off with big shears from the merchants over in Burrfield and force them to dress with. They sniff all the colognes on my dresser and inhale deeply and then run their fingers along the cold stainless steel of my Beretta .40 automatic on the back of