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Amish Country

Ciara M. Blecka

    “Unbelievably lame,” she objected, not missing a beat as she continued to bench press an impressive 200 pounds. She took after her father: raw, ready, and regal, and more than willing to stand up and fight for what she believed in. “You cannot be serious, Dad.”
    “I’m perfectly serious,” he said, flexing and posing in front of the mirror. He considered himself to be on par with The Rock and had perfected a tan and dyed his hair jet-black to project this persona to everyone else.

    “But the country? Really? I’m a city girl. Besides,” Winter went on, “I belong here. With you.”
    Her father sighed. “I know, I know. I’m retiring. You think you have what it takes to take over the business.”
    “I do.” Winter put down the barbell. “I’d be a great bodyguard.”
    Dean rolled his eyes. “You’re a woman.”
    Winter crossed her arms in front of her flat chest. “I’m basically the Lara Croft of women. I could so handle it.”
    “You’re also a teenager. And from the Valley. A Valley Girl.”
    Winter rolled her eyes. “I’m a VSCO girl. And anyway, don’t call me that.”

    “It doesn’t matter.” Dean started packing his gym bag and grabbed his water bottle. “You’re going.”
    Winter groaned. “My mother is the worst! She’s a farmer, for Christ’s sake.”
    “Yes,” Dean agreed. “And you will be a great help to her. Her farm is failing. She could use muscles like yours. To help with the chores. I hear some city slicker wants to buy her out. Turn her family farm into a large-scale corporate deal. She needs the help. Besides, the fresh air will be good for you. And some time without all that technology. You’re better off. It’s just for the summer.”
    “I’d better get this job when I come back,” his daughter warned him. “If I do this, then I’ll totally prove to you I’m strong enough to be a bodyguard.”
    “You’ll prove something,” her father said, leading the way out of the gym. It was the last she saw of him that summer, but not the last time she thought about his business or everything she was missing out on in the big city.
    The outskirts of the small village where her mother lived was even more remote than she remembered. There were trees everywhere: everything green and lush and fragrant. Flowers were in full bloom and there was horse shit on the roads. She saw dead rats laying on the gravel and hummingbirds and crickets came right up onto the porch where her mother rocked in a pale wooden rocking-chair and sipped lemonade. There were Amish buggies that clacked by constantly and tractors that took up half the road, spilling manure everywhere they went. Winter did not enjoy her time spent on lazy afternoons lying in the frayed hammock that was tied between the oak trees in her mother’s back yard and was anxious to return to the buzz of the city. Neither did she enjoy bailing hay or tending to livestock.
    However. She did enjoy the one thing her mother suggested on a particularly rainy afternoon. “Why don’t you tend my garden, Winter?” she said. “It can be very relaxing.”
    While Winter had hated toiling in the fields, her mother’s small vegetable garden was a pleasant place, a place where she could spend time thinking and planning the future she might have one day when she eventually achieved her dreams as an independent woman—not doing womanly work such as washing floors, mending clothes, and cooking dinners. That was her mother’s fate, not hers. And when she dug up the stubborn weeds in the garden with her calloused hands, she felt strong and invincible, not like a weak woman at all.
    She decided to start running. There was a three-mile block that stretched around their neighborhood and she started exploring it, running as fast and as long as she could. She discovered an Amish farm on the far corner where a young cow was tethered to the fence near the road. She seemed proud and defiant, as if she, too, were determined not to be just a victim of her circumstances. She seemed to be looking for her own sense of independence, just like Winter was.
    “I’m going to call you Ferdinand,” she told the cow. “You deserve a proud name, not something like Buttercup or Rosie.” And so Ferdinand she was from that day forward. Ferdinand grazed near a grand garden that was tended by the wife of the Amish man that owned the farm on the corner. The wife’s name was Patience, and she was incredibly so. She would tend that garden day-in and day-out and hang her plain black clothes out on the line while her sons played in the vast yard. She baked cakes and bread and sold them in the quaint Amish bakery they owned. Winter ventured into the bakery to eat free donuts and drink coffee on Saturday mornings, and Patience would talk to her in a thick German accent: “That city slicker wants to make our Amish community—including this bakery—into an attraction,” she would say. “He wants to turn us into employees. But we’re children of God. Dontchya know? I suppose it would be a living.” Would it be a living? To be a mockery of oneself?

    Patience taught her much of the ways of Amish life. She taught her how to bake bread, mend clothes, embroider pillows, and say grace. Winter loved the time she spent with Patience, but there was always the constant mockery of the redneck neighbor boy:
    “It’s how women ought to live,” Buck told her. He was a redneck through and through—and proud of his muscular physique and shaggy head of blonde hair. He worked as an apprentice carpenter for Patience’s husband and he often teased Winter about being as fit as a man.
    “I’m as strong as you,” she told him.
    “Maybe, but you don’t look like a woman ought to,” he told her. Patience had sewn a proper dress for her, but she was loathe to wear it. She wore old t-shirts and patched jean overalls instead.
    “I look better,” she said.
    He just shrugged and chewed on his corncob pipe.
    “I can do anything that you can do, and I can do it better,” she promised him.
    He sipped his coffee laced with Irish Whiskey and gave her a long even stare, propping his steel-toe boots up on one of the hay bales. “Nope, I don’t reckon you can,” he said.
    But, Winter knew he was wrong. She finished out her summer with her mother, building her muscles while she toiled in the fields, using draft horses to pull a plow instead of modern machinery. It was her choice to demonstrate the antiques her mother owned as well as improve her own physique. She had something to prove now not only to her father, but to Buck the redneck boy as well. And she was determined to keep this a family farm, not let it become some industrialized theme park.
    “You’ve made this house a home, Winter,” her mother told her. She realized it had become a home for her. She’d grown to love Ferdinand who waited for her patiently at the edge of the field every day, and she’d grown to love Patience who hung laundry on the line every morning and saved sweet rolls for her straight out of the oven. Most of all, she’d grown to love her mother who had taught her how to can raspberry jam and salsa and sat with her on the porch on long summer nights while the tiki torches burned and the frogs and crickets sang out by the pond out back.

    “I almost wish I didn’t have to leave,” she said softly, pulling her long blonde hair back from her face and into a tight ponytail. That ponytail had always been pulled tight when she went to the gym. Now it was pulled back so she could work in the garden or milk cows in the barn. She’d been wearing overalls this morning. Now she was wearing Prada. It almost felt uncomfortable to her and out of place somehow.
    “You don’t have to,” her mother assured her. “You’re always welcome here, you know. I could use the help.”
    Winter shook her head, but she knew it was true. What would happen to her mother’s farm after she was gone? But she had her obligations. She had made her promises. Not only to her father, but to herself. “Courtlandt Executive Protection,” she said firmly. “My father needs me.”
    Her mother nodded sadly. “You’ll always be your Daddy’s girl.”
    But was she? She returned to the city, but the city no longer spoke her language. Her language had become one of bees and butterflies. She arrived at her father’s firm and was greeted by none other than Buck the Redneck who had sucked on his corncob pipe and taunted her for being nothing more than a woman.
    “What are you doing here?” she demanded.
    “Aw, shucks, Winter,” he said, twisting his baseball cap backwards. “You yapped so much about your daddy’s little predicament, I thought the least I could do was help out.”
    Winter narrowed her eyes at him. “What do you mean by that?”
    Her father appeared then, smiling widely and sauntering with his usual bravado. He slapped Buck on the back. “Well, darlin’,” he told Winter, “we found ourselves a brand new bodyguard to take over the business. So you don’t have to worry your pretty head about nothing.”
    “What?” Winter was furious. “How could you? That was my job!”
    “You’re a woman,” Buck dismissed her. “How could you protect a celebrity? They wouldn’t trust you no further than they could throw you themselves. Go back to the farm little lady and wash your clothes.”
    Winter narrowed her eyes at him. “I will,” she promised.

    When she arrived at the farm, the con man that intended to weasel her mother’s legacy out from underneath her emaciated belly was already there wheeling and dealing.
    “You will not have this farm, nor any other in this neighborhood,” Winter declared.
    “And how will you pay the bills for it then, little Miss?” the man wanted to know. He sneered haughtily at her.
    She stared him down in her designer duds with her hair pulled back from her face. “My trust fund,” she said.
    Her mother’s breath seemed to be sucked from her chest. “Baby, you wouldn’t,” she whispered.
    “I would,” she said. “I’m eighteen now. This is my farm. This is my neighborhood. Get out.”
    And the man had no choice. No man had the power over Winter or her mother or Patience or Ferdinand or their farms.

    “We may be ladies, Mother,” she told her. “But we can do any man’s work.”
    And so they did. And low and behold, Buck couldn’t make it in the big city. He ran her father’s business into the ground within six months. And back he came, begging Patience and her husband for his carpentry apprenticeship back.
    “I don’t know, Buck,” Winter said, clucking her tongue. She sipped her coffee laced with Irish whiskey and propped her steel-toe boots up on a bale of hay. “I don’t know if you’re as strong as us women. We’ve been raising these barns while you’ve been gone and I have to say, we do quality work. Higher quality than you ever did.”
    “That, I reckon,” Buck said and chewed on his corncob pipe.

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