Matt Wanat
THE AMISH BOYS READ ZANE GREY
When the Bookmobile arrived every other Tuesday, Hannah Miller, the young teacher at the Hopewell school, let the children board the bus unsupervised. It was the first weeks of Hannah’s last year teaching all grades at the parochial school. She was to be married the following Spring.
Effie Miller, who was no relation to her teacher, was habitually first in line for the Bookmobile. A sixth-grader with only two years left of formal schooling, Effie loved the long bus filled of books. They were, in fact, Effie’s favorite reason for going to Hopewell.
The Amish boys read Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, Max Brand, Karl May. Some of the girls did too, but most of the girls chose animal books: Cinchfoot, Doctor Rabbit stories, King: The Story of a Sheep Dog. Some books were forbidden by the bishop. Maxwell, the driver, was asked to move the Colby book Fighting Gear of World War II to a higher shelf. But the bishop mostly kept out of it. The kids made many of their own choices. They knew when a book was bad and rarely came home with anything violent or worldly. Effie was a good reader. She checked out a half dozen books every two weeks.
Effie’s cousins from near Charm no longer used the Bookmobile. Their school was removed from the vehicle’s list of stops after an Amish girl came home with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Effie told Rachel, Betsy, Mary, and Kendra about her cousins’ ordeal, and for the next two months the girls increased circulation in nonfiction—sewing and canning and garden books—always a safe choice with their bishop and their parents. Soon, however, the girls were back in animal fiction—books about dogs and books about horses—though by that point Kendra was hooked on geography books about Holland and Spain.
“Beheef dich,” Effie told herself in her father’s voice as she reached for one of the Westerns.
Tall and strubbly and kind, Maxwell watched the milling of Effie and her classmates from his bus seat where he mostly stayed out of the children’s way.
Rachel found a book about a red pony.
“Which is the book about the veterinarian?” Mary asked Effie.
Effie knew the books better than her friends did.
Effie held with two hands a massive hardback entitled Dutch Treat. She held the book like she might hold a medium-sized pumpkin. The book was not heavy—Effie was strong—but it was a large, boxy tome.
“Is this a Western?” Effie asked Troy.
“Elmore Leonard writes Westerns,” Troy confirmed.
“All Creatures Great and Small,” Effie told her impatient friend Mary.
Effie wondered why the big book in her own hands was called Dutch Treat?
The Hunted, one of three stories in Dutch Treat, might be violent. Then again, Effie thought, it might be about hunting, which within Effie’s community was considered fair game.
Effie loved to watch Maxwell use the ink stamp, and it was because Effie was watching Maxwell use the stamp that Effie at first missed his concerned visage.
“That book’s got action,” Maxwell told her.
“The Amish boys read Zane Grey,” Effie replied.
Maxwell conceded this was true.
The girls knew nothing of Maxwell. The Bookmobile traveled the whole county, as far East as the Tuscarawas County line and as far West as Lakeville, where they raced cars on a speedway for the English. Maxwell’s life outside the Bookmobile was a geographic mystery. Tall and disheveled and mysterious, Maxwell could have lived anywhere, and Effie relished this possibility as much as she relished the peculiar spectacle of the driver’s strubbly deportment.
The hair on Maxwell’s face and scalp was so wooly that Effie thought he looked like an alpaca. His beard had a mustache. Once Mary asked him if he had a beard because he was married.
“Not married,” Maxwell confessed. “I grow this bad boy just because.”
Effie already knew that beards meant nothing among the English, but Mary was ignorant about a lot of things.
Maxwell stroked his beard as he studied the Elmore Leonard book in Effie’s arms. Uncharacteristically, the big book was the girl’s only withdrawal. Maybe Maxwell was worried he would get in trouble for loaning it to her, Effie thought.
To ease Maxwell’s mind, Effie added, “I’ll stop reading if the book is bad.”
This promise seemed to satisfy Maxwell. Effie was a sweet girl, and Maxwell believed she was telling the truth.
“Just don’t let your mother put it in the burn barrel,” Maxwell teased. He knew the fate of The Hitchhiker’s Guide in Charm. Effie chuckled. Perhaps her mother’s brother had overreacted.
Effie often ran the two-mile trip from the Hopewell schoolhouse on 519 to her family farm on 51. That day, however, because she could not wait to open Dutch Treat, Effie stopped where the bridge on the gravel road crosses Paint Creek. There Effie sat on the guardrail and opened to one of the three stories in the book: The Hunted. Two pages in Effie blushed. A steel-wheeled tractor pulling a wagon full of third cutting approached on the gravel road, and Effie, ashamed of the book, found herself scrambling up the long driveway that met the road at the bridge.
The driveway belonged to the Kovacs, an implement dealer husband and dental hygienist wife, whose two boys, Mickey and Pearl, Effie did not like, for the boys were bullies who rode their red three-wheeler on everyone’s property and hunted dangerously in the fall with their father. Nevertheless, Effie ran from the tractor up the Kovacs’ driveway until she came to a culvert over a small stream feeding Paint Creek. There Effie scurried into the culvert until the tractor and wagon were gone.
“No hunting in this story,” Effie said to herself, looking down at the big book. She sat on a dry rock beside the culvert under the Kovacs’ driveway, watching a beautiful black and yellow garden spider produce web.
“Maybe I should have gotten a book about animals.”
ϖ
“I hope it is not a bad book,” Effie’s mother told Effie nine days later.
“It is three books in one,” Effie told her mother. “I skipped the first two books.”
“What is ‘Swag’?” her mother asked. Her mother was teasing, Effie thought.
“I don’t know,” Effie said. “Nor do I want to find out.”
The mother and daughter laughed.
“I stopped reading The Hunted,” Effie said. “I thought it might be about hunting, but I was wrong.” She did not offer to tell her mother any more about the story.
“Why did you get such a book from the Bookmobile?” Effie’s mother asked. “Maxwell should have stopped you.”
“I thought it might have animals in a western setting,” Effie said, giggling.
“In a western setting?”
“Yes,” Effie said. “The Amish boys all read Zane Grey.”
“Zane Grey?”
“He was from Zanesville,” Effie said, hoping this might placate her mother. “He wrote Westerns and a biography on George Washington. The Amish boys all read Westerns. Some of the girls do too.”
Effie’s mother was not convinced.
“Did you read Mr. Majestyk?” Effie’s mother asked. “Not about magic, I hope.”
“About a melon farmer,” Effie said, giggling again.
Her mother joined her laugher.
But Effie had not finished that story either. It was very violent, very worldly, very bad. Effie did not need for her mother to make her stop reading the book. Effie was a good reader, but she knew when a book was bad. She knew when to stop reading.
“Wash up and call Emmanuel for dinner,” Effie’s mother said.
Emmanuel was Effie’s brother. He was twenty-nine years old, but he had the mind of a child.
“And ring the bell for Father,” Effie’s mother added.
Effie called Emmanuel, who was playing in the garden. She told him to wash up for dinner. Then Effie rang the bell and Father came in from the barn and they ate.
ϖ
“Where is my book?” Effie asked her mother the next day.
Emmanuel sat rocking gently in the corner of the summer kitchen. Beneath the skylight, kneading bread, Effie’s mother frowned.
“Your father took the book with the rubbish,” Effie’s mother said.
“No!” cried Effie.
“It was a bad book, Effie. You should have told me.”
“It belongs to the Bookmobile!” Effie said.
Effie’s mother thought about Effie’s point, then frowned some more.
Effie ran from the summer kitchen to the rusted barrel on the hill behind the smokehouse. Black and blue smoke rolled from the barrel. Her father was nowhere in sight.
Effie looked down into the barrel. Dutch Treat was on top of burning papers and old bills, the pile propped above the worst of the fire by an empty box, hot with flame from within its hollow cardboard chamber. Effie reached into the heat and retrieved Dutch Treat just before the flames rose from the box and the box collapsed, wafting ashy gray smoke into the summer air.
Effie ran to the barn with the charred book. From where Effie stood at the man-door on the barn, she watched her father appear from inside the chicken house. Effie’s father looked at the barrel smoking black and blue and gray in the morning sun. He went in for breakfast.
ϖ
For three days Effie hid the book in the granary then took it with her on Tuesday when she walked on the county and township roads to the parochial school. Two weeks earlier, the day Maxwell put the ink stamp return date in the back of Dutch Treat, Effie had stopped over Paint Creek to read on her way home. Now she could not get rid of the book quickly enough.
Effie was sorry that she had read the book, but she could not let her father burn it. It was the property of the Bookmobile. She had to return it.
“What’s this on the corner?” Maxwell asked.
Effie blushed.
“I’ve heard of dogeared books, but this is ridiculous,” said the strubbly Bookmobile driver.
Effie knew he was teasing.
“Sorry,” Effie said.
Maxwell stroked his beard thoughtfully, thinking of The Hitchhiker’s Guide meeting its fate in a burn barrel in Charm.
“Looks like a last-minute rescue,” Maxwell added.
“Just like in a story by Zane Grey,” Effie quipped, trying to lighten the mood.
“Maybe Westerns aren’t for Amish girls.”
“It was a modern Western,” Effie added, then giggled: “about a melon farmer!”
“I’ve read Swag,” Maxwell added. “Definitely not a Western.”
“I didn’t read that one,” Effie assured him. “Nor did I finish Mr. Majestyk.”
“Too worldly?” Maxwell asked.
“And violent,” Effie said.
“They say Leonard has a plain style,” Maxwell added, “though I guess not plain enough for you Amish.”
ϖ
A week passed. Effie continued to walk to school just as she continued to work and play at home. Emmanuel played in the garden. The sweet corn had grown tall. The potatoes. The tomatoes. The lima beans. Late-season vines of watermelon, cantaloupe, and honeydew still spread from earthen mounds, sprawling in every direction.
“Maybe Westerns aren’t for Amish girls.” Effie repeated Maxwell’s words to Emmanuel. Her brother guffawed disproportionately.
“Or maybe I should have tried Zane Grey instead,” Effie added. Effie had never been south of Coshocton, but she liked the idea of Zanesville and wondered if the town was named for the writer of Westerns, or was it the writer for the town?”
“It cannot be named for Zane Grey,” Effie said to Emmanuel. “Dumkupf Effie,” she added, quietly scolding herself. “You sound like Mary.”
“Where is the blue-handled sickle?” Effie’s father asked from the gate.
“The sickle?” Effie paused, startled. “Oh no! I left it in the flower bed at school. I took it to help my teacher clear trumpet vine!”
Effie’s father looked frustrated.
“I’ll go get it,” Effie told him.
“It can wait until tomorrow,” her father said. “I was going to ask you and Emmanuel to edge the garden fence.”
“There’s still sun,” Effie said. “I can take my bike.”
“No,” Emmanuel said. “I want to go.”
“Emmanuel and I can run then,” Effie said, adapting her plan.
Effie’s father thought about her suggestion.
“All right,” he said. “But hurry back. When you edge the fence, let Emmanuel drive the wheelbarrow. And bring some corn and melon in for dinner.”
Emmanuel only ran the first mile, then floundered, frustrating Effie until they were a few hundred yards from the school and Effie asked him to wait for her while she ran to get the sickle.
When Effie returned, winded and moving more slowly to be careful with the blade, Emmanuel was rested, and the two of them walked briskly—“Amish walking,” Effie’s mother sometimes facetiously called it. Effie and Emmanuel kept this pace all the way down to the mysterious farm their English neighbors called “Closed Circuit,” then up 502 towards 51 and home.
At the bridge over Paint Creek, Effie and Emmanuel heard children laughing.
“None shall pass!” boomed a boy’s voice.
Like a voice from a deep well, the boy’s words were made more sonorous by the concrete and steel of the bridge.
“No,” Emmanuel said quietly.
“It’s all right, Emmanuel.”
Effie looked down over the guardrail for the source of the sonorous voice, cringing as she saw the Kovacs boys’ three-wheeler, its front and back hauling racks loaded with sticks from the creek.
“It’s Effie!” Mickey Kovacs said to his brother Pearl.
Pearl liked Effie, but Effie did not like Pearl.
“Hello,” Effie said politely.
Pearl stepped out from under the bridge.
“We’re the bridge trolls!” Pearl shouted.
“And Lemuel!” Mickey added excitedly. Mickey and Pearl always called Emmanuel “Lemuel,” and though he was foot taller and seventeen years older than Mickey and Pearl Kovacs, Emmanuel was terrified of the English boys.
“Hungarian,” Mickey had once told Emmanuel. “We’re not English, dummy! We’re Hungarian.”
“But our mom’s English and jerked-over,” Pearl had corrected.
“Shut up, Pearl.”
Now Pearl jumped on the three-wheeler pretending to drive it without starting it.
“Vroom! Vroom!” Pearl said, looking up mockingly at Emmanuel, then gazing at Effie.
“Want to ride the Big Wheel, Lemuel?” Mickey asked.
Effie knew that the English called the three-wheeler a “Big Red.” A “Big Wheel” was a red and blue and black and yellow plastic toy.
“We will be late for dinner,” Effie said.
“We’re catching crawdads,” Pearl said, jumping back off the three-wheeler and grabbing a large Maxwell’s House can from the bank. “Want to see?”
Emmanuel perked up. He liked catching crayfish in Paint Creek, chasing them backwards into a cup.
“Just quickly,” Effie said, and stuck the point of the sickle in the porous top of one of the guardrail posts.
Effie helped Emmanuel down the bank to the side of Paint Creek.
“Look here, Lem,” Pearl said kindly, showing Emmanuel and Effie the contents of the coffee can. The can was full of crayfish, floating miserably in rusty water made tepid by the afternoon sun.
“It’s like a little lobster tank, huh?” Pearl said. Neither Effie nor Emmanuel had ever seen a lobster tank, but Effie agreed that the crayfish looked like tiny freshwater lobsters.
“Let’s see one,” Mickey said, reaching in for one of the crayfish.
Mickey dangled the crayfish in Emmanuel’s face, causing the man to laugh. Then Mickey tossed the crayfish at Effie’s bodice, finding himself annoyed when Effie failed to flinch.
“We better go,” Effie said to Emmanuel.
“Let’s catch crayfish,” Emmanuel said.
“We will tomorrow,” Effie said. “We have to get the sickle home and edge the garden.”
Pearl looked up at the sickle in the guardrail post above them and started singing Alexandrov’s Soviet National Anthem in fake Russian, proud of the amplification of his pubescently deepening voice under the bridge.
Emmanuel was startled and began to look worried.
“Damn commies!” Mickey said as Pearl’s song ended with a fit of coughing laughter.
“Come on,” Pearl said. “Stay. We’re going to catch them all.” Pearl reached into the can an pulled out a crayfish and studied it. Mickey studied his as well. “There won’t be any crawdads left tomorrow,” Mickey added, which worried Emmanuel even more.
Effie’s hand was on Emmanuel’s back, encouraging him up the bank, when she was stopped by Mickey reaching up to tug on her skirt.
“Hey, Lemuel,” Mickey said.
Emmanuel turned to look down at the boy.
“Watch this,” Mickey said, and then wound up like the pitchers Emmanuel liked watching at the Amish baseball games and hurled the crayfish against the concrete foundation of the bridge.
The crayfish made a wet, nearly massless crack against the concrete.
“Dammit, Mickey!” Pearl said. “I was saving those.”
Off-balance on the bank, Emmanuel hunched speechless. The worry on his face turned to fear.
Mickey reached in the can and pulled out another crayfish, this time trying to skip it like a stone off the surface of the creek but missing the water and instead exploding the small exoskeleton against a large rock.
“Stop it!” Effie told Mickey.
“Your girlfriend has sass,” Mickey told Pearl.
“That’s not nice!” Emmanuel shouted, as Effie got him to the top of the bank.
“Not nice?” Mickey repeated back. “Pearl, Lemuel says that we ain’t nice.”
“Oh, Lem,” Pearl said.
“He’s right, it’s not nice,” Effie said, silencing Pearl, who stood looking hurt by Effie’s words.
“Hell with it!” Pearl said and threw his crayfish at the end of the bridge, laughing at the crunch of the tiny creature against the diagonal concrete retaining wall.
“Stop!” Emmanuel cried.
“Come, Emmanuel,” Effie said, pushing her brother gently towards the sickle.
“Stop!” Emmanuel cried again, a crayfish whizzing past his head.
Effie teetered the sickle back and worth, wobbling the tool loose from the post like a maul from a piece of firewood. Effie heard car tires on gravel in the distance, but when she turned to look for the car, a crayfish hit her in the bonnet. Emmanuel was weeping. Effie was furious.
“Stop!” Emmanuel bawled. “Dumkupf! Dumkupf!”
“Emmanuel!” Effie corrected. “Beheef dich!”
“Dumkupf!” Emmanuel screamed. The crayfish were flying faster now, and Effie pulled Emmanuel back from the guardrail so that she might to put the bridge itself between her brother and the boys in the ravine.
“Don’t say that, Emmanuel,” Effie told her brother.
“Don’t say that, Lemuel!” Pearl mocked from the creek below.
Effie and Emmanuel were in the middle of the road now, Effie pulling her brother as his big frame got heavier, harder to move, as if he had taken root in the gravel and steel of the bridge.
“Dumkupf!” Emmanuel screamed.
Effie heard the three-wheeler ignition in the creek bed then turned to see the approach of the vehicle she had heard coming down the road.
The vehicle was a black van, like the kind drivers use to haul the Amish, but smaller and older, with rust along the sides. A sticker stretched across the top of the van’s windshield. It read “Dylan & the Dead,” maybe for a movie, Effie thought, or a television show.
Meanwhile, the Kovac boys’ Big Red climbed the bank, nearly flipping over backwards from the weight of Pearl and the branches on the hauling rack. The boys were red-faced with laughter when they got to the end of the bridge, facing the black van now stopped at the other end, with Effie and Emmanuel standing on the gravel between.
“What’s going on here?” the van driver asked, jumping out and seeing Emmanuel and Effie’s visible distress.
“Maxwell!” Effie shouted, for it was the Bookmobile driver Maxwell, though Effie had never seen him drive anything other than the Bookmobile.
But Maxwell, glaring at the three-wheeler, barely seemed to notice Effie at all.
“What the hell are you boys doing?” Maxwell asked the Kovacs, who sat idling.
“We’re just gathering sticks,” Pearl said, his face now stricken from the reprimand in Maxwell’s adult voice.
“I’m not talking about the goddamned sticks!” Maxwell shouted. “What the hell did you do to these Amish?”
“We’re just messing around,” Mickey said, tears welling in his eyes.
Maxwell looked down at a crayfish fallen from a fold in Effie’s dress. The crustacean writhed in the dry dirt and gravel of the road, oozing puss from its thorax.
“Jesus Christ!” Maxwell said. Emmanuel’s eyes widened.
Emmanuel had ceased crying, though now Pearl, sitting behind his brother on the three-wheeler, bawled and hiccupped uncontrollably.
“Stop it, Pearl,” Mickey said, himself also crying.
Quietly, Maxwell said to Effie, “Get you and your brother into the van.”
Effie had been told by her parents not to except rides from the English.
“I’ll drive you home,” Maxwell said.
Effie did what she was told, grabbing Emmanuel’s hand and leading her brother to the van.
ϖ
“You live close then?” Effie asked Maxwell as he made the turn onto 51 towards the Miller farm.
“About two miles west of Sunny Slope,” Maxwell told her. “Where do I turn?”
“Not this one but the next,” Effie told him.
Maxwell’s tape deck played strange-sounding music, and red and green lights bounced on either side of the place where the tape was inserted. Effie asked if the player was new, but Maxwell said it was ten years old, recycled from his last car. “A Z28!” Maxwell added, smiling.
Effie did not know what type of music it was that was playing, but in the song a gravelly voice sang about serving the Lord instead of the Devil. Effie let herself listen.
“I never knew we were neighbors,” Effie said.
“I’m originally from Martin’s Ferry,” Maxwell said, “but my girlfriend’s from Killbuck. Been in Holmes County eight years.”
Effie had never heard of Martin’s Ferry, but she nodded as though she had.
“You okay, son?” Maxwell asked Emmanuel.
“I’m okay,” Emmanuel said.
Maxwell steered the van into the Miller’s driveway.
“I’m sorry you two kids had to go through that,” Maxwell said. “That wasn’t right.”
Emmanuel cried a little, but then reined it in and smiled at Maxwell as the van eased past the house.
Maxwell parked the van beside the white fence that wrapped around the garden.
Emmanuel climbed eagerly out of the back, muttered “Thank you,” shut the van door carefully, and walked slump-shouldered towards the house.
“The muskmelons look good,” Maxwell said.
“I’ll give you some,” Effie told him.
“That’s okay, save your melons.”
“Please,” Effie said. “I insist.”
“Okay,” Maxwell said.
“I’ll ask if you can stay for dinner. We will be happy have you.”
“I’d better not,” Maxwell said. “Lisa and I are going to the football game.”
Effie sat in the passenger seat staring into the garden. Maxwell looked up at the burn barrel behind the smokehouse.
“Plus,” Maxwell added, “I wouldn’t want your parents to give me heck for that Elmore Leonard book.”
Effie giggled.
“I’m sorry for my language on the bridge,” Maxwell said to her.
“Those boys,” Effie said. “They made me so angry—angry and sad.”
“Some boys’ll do that,” Maxwell admitted.
Maxwell smiled and waved at Effie’s father, who was walking towards the van from the barn. Effie’s father smiled and waved back.
Effie got out and set the sickle gently beside the garden fence.
Maxwell turned the music down and rolled down his window to talk to Effie’s father.
“Hi there, sir,” Maxwell said.
“Hello, neighbor,” Eli Miller replied to the driver.
Effie stood by the fence, studying Maxwell and her father.
“Thank you for giving my children a lift,” Miller added, not showing any sign of curiosity as to why there was a van in his driveway.
“No problem, sir,” Maxwell told the Amishman.
Miller stood in the gravel smiling.
“Effie!” Rachel Miller called from the house.
Effie could tell from her mother’s expression that Emmanuel had told their mother what had happened.
Maxwell put the van in reverse.
“Effie will fill you in on the details,” Maxwell said to Miller as the driver backed the van into the turnaround by the garden and turned the wheel back away from the Miller home.
Maxwell waved at Effie’s mother, who waved back reluctantly.
“Effie and Emmanuel have been through some stuff this afternoon,” Maxwell added to Effie’s father.
Maxwell could see concern growing in the man’s face.
“They’re all right,” Maxwell added to ease the suspense. The Amishman nodded calmly.
“Anyway,” Maxwell said, pulling away. “Effie has quite a story to tell.”
Matt Wanat’s books include Breaking Down Breaking Bad and The Films of Clint Eastwood, and his shorter work has appeared in several journals and collections, with Wanat’s creative essay “Walking at Night” forthcoming in Pennsylvania English. Wanat is an associate professor of English at Ohio University Lancaster.