Plank steps creaked beneath my leather clogs, and I pushed open the screen door of the clapboard storefront, expecting a bell to ding. The shadowy air inside smelled muddy from the greenhouse. A gaunt Amish man greeted me. Of average height for a man and therefore a couple inches shorter than I am, he had a long beard signifying he was married, which I knew because I’d lived in Amish country for over fifteen years. He wore work boots, black trousers, black suspenders, and a sweat-stained white shirt. His simple straw hat had a flat top and a sharp black band. Nearby, seated at a low desk, a woman busied herself with a ledger. She wore a plain blue dress with white kapp over her hair to signify she was married. She flicked me a quick smile.
I cheerfully explained my errand while sanding at the hand-hewn wood counter with its mechanical cash register and stacks of Saran-wrapped whoopie pies. I was on the hunt for bleeding heart, Dicentra spectabilis, to give as a housewarming gift to my friend Lila. I opened my mouth to add that Lila was the first among my friends to get divorced and the first to buy her own house, but thought better of it.
“It won’t be in leaf,” the man said. “It will look as if you’re giving your friend a pot of dirt.”
“I know.” It was autumn, and bleeding heart’s a spring flower. “That’s why Home Depot doesn’t have it now.”
“English don’t usually want to buy plants they can’t see.” The man narrowed his eyes. “Come along. We have to walk a long way.”
“That’s okay,” I said. I was in my early thirties, slim and fit, and I still believed I was not at all like other English who were willfully ignorant about rhythms of life outside our factory-made culture.
Zook and Sons Nursery (not their real name) sat on a hill in a green valley ruthlessly cleared of trees. The large, white, two-story farmhouse stood beside an oversized barn almost as tall as it was wide. Beyond lay the first of many quonset greenhouses ribbed like whalebones, over which stretched a taut, translucent skin of white polyethylene.
Zook led me around the counter and through a door into the muted light of the attached greenhouse. I kept up easily as we strode between rows of green leaves in mossy clay pots. As a mountain biker, a horseback rider, and a former feral child of the seventies, I was a lifelong trespasser; I grew up at a time when children ran unsupervised through other people’s backyards and woods. As an adult, I carried the assumption that “No Trespassing” signs were for other people into the mountains of Pennsylvania. When property owners saw me biking or riding on their land, all they did was wave and smile, so I kept going. Over the years of riding and caring for horses, I learned out to trudge pastures without twisting my ankles, open old-fangled latches, wink against flies, and maintain stride as my eyes adjusted between open sun and unlit barns. I was not entirely citified.
Following in Zook’s wake, however, put me square into the eye-stinging cloud of man-vapor. Never before had I caught such a virulent whiff of unwashed male, days upon days of sweat, layer upon layer of scalp sebum thickening under his straw cap.
Slowing to add distance between me and the man-stink, I followed him to the end of the greenhouse and out the door. We crossed a bright patch of grass and sunshine before slipping into another greenhouse, rows and rows of pots and plants on hip-high shelves. We marched the length of that one and out another. I can’t remember how many greenhouses we traversed and exited before the flash of a chestnut mare and foal caught my eye and I veered off, leaving Zook holding the next door.
He joined me at the rail. “You like horses?”
“Not particularly.” Even though I’d been riding since age twelve, I wasn’t your typical horse-crazy female. I was dog-crazy. However, my best friend, Susan, was horse-crazy, and she dragged me to a rent-a-hag stable. There, for a fraction of our baby-sitting money, we could disappear into the woods unsupervised and literally horse around for hours. At first, Susan’s mother dropped us off, but before long, we were bicycling along a highway, further than our paper routes ever took us, no cell phone to speak or even dream of, our mothers barely listening when we yelled, “Bye! I’m going to the stable!”
Within the year we were mucking stalls for free rides. I loved every minute, but none of it was my idea. To me, horses were just dogs I could ride. Or rather, the horses were themselves. Smokey and Clem, Sheesa and Shannon, Feather and Foxfire were all characters with their own backstories, exactly as I was. Like most humans in my orbit, the horses were both obliged and willing to put up with me, a youngster eager to learn how one gets along in this world. Innately curious, I studied everything put in front of me (except History and Math). I aimed to do everything right, and kindly too. How do you persuade a thousand-pound animal to carry you safely onward and not gallop breakneck back to the barn? How and why do you use a hoof pick? How do you offer an apple slice to those monstrous, thumping lips? Such questions were easier to answer than the ones asked in middle school where I wondered why some kids had new shoes and enough to eat and others didn’t, and why the rich kids didn’t sit with poor kids in the cafeteria and why no one cared that kids like me, in the middle, sat with anyone they liked, and why my dad stopped coming home for dinner, or why my mom went back to college.
I remember Zook boasting at length about his Standardbreds. I don’t recall the details or feeling pressured to buy a horse. I was simply listening to someone indulge his passion, which is usually interesting to me, especially if it involves animals. I lingered. I must’ve been upwind.
I do recall the mare. Curious about the newcomer, she lifted her head, blinked her limpid eyes, and approached, head low and muzzle outstretched. I dipped my head and turned my face aside as the horses before her had taught me. Whiskers tickling, she ran her nostrils over my hand, neck, and cheek. She blew into my hair. As her nostrils eclipsed mine, I opened my mouth; we exchanged breath, which is to say, we exchanged the time of day: what are you eating, how are you feeling? I stroked her sun-warmed neck. From a short distance, her half-grown filly trembled and stared, absorbing the hegemony of horses, women, and men.
A few minutes passed. Zook was quizzing me on my experiences with horses, and I was answering candidly. My mind must’ve drifted.
Then, in a low, lewd voice, he said, “Have you ever seen them do it?”
Let me stop right here and confess, I still don’t know what to do when a man says something smutty. I’m not talking about bawdy banter. God bless a man who can frolic the fine line between flirtation and offense. Zook showed no attempt at humor, no playfulness, and we shared no companionable meandering into the imagined sex lives of farm animals. The comment struck as an abrupt and utterly unexpected pivot, the same way my cat will purr when you pet her and suddenly scratch. All the hours I’d spent: on Susan’s bedroom floor flipping through Horse & Rider, moseying through stream beds bareback with Mary on Smokey and Clem, chatting with Jan while we curried Shannon and Nacho’s coats, nearly twenty-five years of life with horsewomen, almost two-thirds of my consciousness, and never before had anyone said such a thing to me in such a tone of voice.
I decided to deflect. “Have I seen them pull buggies?” I nodded at the mare. “Oh, sure, many times. I’ve lived in Centre County, oh, about twelve years, and before that I went to school near Lancaster, so I’ve seen lots of buggies on the road, and before that, my father worked in—”
“Have you ever seen ‘em makin’ a foal?”
“Well, no,” I stammered. I decided to remind him my body occupied sacred roles. “At the farm where my husband and I take our daughter to ride, the mares are suddenly already pregnant, and then one day, lo and behold, there’s a foal.” My people would come looking for me. I headed toward the next greenhouse. “Are the bleeding hearts in here?” I opened the door myself.
We might have passed through one or two more greenhouses before we reached the bleeding heart. The final greenhouse held nothing but six-inch clay pots of dirt, all the botanical action buried out of sight. Zook handed me a pot, assuring me I could choose another if I wanted, but promising they all held the same number of buried rhizomes. Only now, as I look back, does it occur to me that because the pots all appeared identical, there was no good reason for me to venture into a distant greenhouse alone with Zook. He could have left me in the storefront with his wife.
I accepted the heavy clay pot, thanked him kindly, and turned for the long walk back to the cash register. I chose to return along the pasture fence, out in the open sunshine. Zook tried to keep up as I navigated the uneven ground with ease despite the fact that my clogs were slippery on the inside. The crisp air and green hills restored my good humor, and, as if he hadn’t said what he said, Zook called my attention to a herd in a pasture. He spoke of genetics, conformation, bloodlines, trends and sales, the demands for and the demands placed on an Amish carriage horse.
Because I had committed myself to pretending he hadn’t said what he said, I stopped at the split rail and let myself enjoy being treated as an equestrian, taking me backwards in time to the woman I was when my college roommate and I escaped campus in her brother’s pickup truck and drove out to ride horses on her family farm near Lancaster, when I played hooky from high school with to ride with my best friend who dreamed of owning her own stable, or when I was in elementary school and spent the night at Susan’s, and we played with Breyers horse statues on her gritty bedroom floor and dreamed not of husbands, not of babies, but of the horses we’d have.
He asked if I would like to see the stallion.
Of course I would.
He led me past the storefront and toward the barn. The great door gaped like the mouth of a cave. He disappeared inside.
Having assumed the stallion was outside, like the other horses dotting the distant acres, I hesitated before crossing into the cooler shadows of the barn. Following him inside with the heavy pot resting on my hip like a child, I welcomed the familiar dust, the hay, the friendly aromas of horseflesh and manure, the hopeful snorting and nickering, the glossy blink of intelligent eyes. This barn, however, didn’t go straight through like the barns I knew, which were built shotgun, a rectangle with sliding doors on each short end, and on the long sides the stalls, a tack room, and storage. This barn was wider, almost square, with vast open central area and a high ceiling. The far wall was closed off, windowless, a dead end.
With the only exit behind me, my senses heightened. Remembering some tidbit from a horse novel or a Nancy Drew mystery, I trusted the swiveling ears of the horses to tell me whether Zook and I were the only humans in the barn, and so we seemed to be.
Zook opened a solid door to a windowless, hay-strewn room in which a lone horse stomped and turned, a shining black and copper beast that appeared taller at the withers than Zook was at the top of his flat straw hat. Zook seized the creature’s halter and pulled him clopping into the central area for display. The stallion spun his hind quarters into the wide open space. He threw his head, viciously jerking Zook’s arm, flared his dragon nostrils, and tossed his incandescent mane. His hooves struck the ground like empty goblets. He yanked against Zook’s grasp as if accustomed to captivity he could no longer endure, and on he stomped and screeched—the vigor, the glory, the rage!
Perhaps Zook misunderstood my interest in horseflesh. I hadn’t spent my girlhood and young womanhood in the company of horse-crazy females out of love for horses in particular, but for animals in general, especially those women. My favorite girlfriends weren’t afraid of rain on their faces. As deft with pitchforks as dinner forks, they lifted bales and broke the cords and scattered the hay. They had enough patience to wrap polos properly every time, to study the nutritional value of grains and make informed decisions about storage and portions, to devote as many hours to reading about horses as riding them, and to stand in the sun with a longe line and a whip as long as it took. They taught me all this and more, such as how to massage mink oil into leather clogs to make them new again. I wasn’t like that myself, but I was, essentially, a companion animal, like my Border Collies. I have two-point in my muscle memory, automatically nod during horse talk, and ask the questions horse women love to answer.
When Zook put his stallion back into solitary confinement and closed the door, it was as if the sun had set.
He removed his hat and wiped his brow with the back of his hand. He asked, “How many children do you have?”
“A daughter.”
Why didn’t I lie? Why does an ominous stranger deserve the truth? Or politeness? Or any response at all? In my defense I did withhold that I was a heartbroken woman, lonely and longing for more children, and my husband, himself one of thirteen, had had a vasectomy against my will in violation of our faith as Catholics, betraying my trust in him not to overpower me, overrule me, dictate the terms of my life and our family and every truth I held to be self-evident as a liberated “English,” living rightfully free on what was supposed to be a gender-level-playing field. Ever since the day my husband came home and set a sack of ice on his crotch, my heart stood bewildered and bereft. Our daughter was now seven, and year after year, my side of the scale wouldn’t balance under the weight of a womb as light as an empty balloon. It would take me two more years to realize that sack of ice forever shattered our marriage. How had I let it happen? Before the operation, I did speak up to my husband. I raged and reasoned and begged, don’t do this, but I spoke in my own voice, young and female, high-pitched, dependent, and by itself too small.
Behind their stall doors, the horses cupped their ears to the open door behind me. A shadow slid across the dirt. By reflex I turned to leave, but in the center of the open doorway stood the silhouette of a second man, holding a pitchfork across his waist as if to block my path.
“I have eleven children,” Zook said, ignoring the newcomer in the doorway. Zook approached me, still catching his breath from handling the stallion. His voice thrummed. “How comes it you have just the one?”
“It’s God’s will.” Why do I count on mousy reminders of morality to stop hellbent men? A mare will kick. Bitches bite. No one draws blood quite like a house cat.
And then Zook got to the point: “Have you ever thought of doin’ it with someone else?”
On an updraft of fear I took the shortest path to Zook’s wife, the blank white space to the right of the man with the pitchfork, his young, shaven face shrouded against the afternoon sun. In those few seconds my brain rehearsed kicking off the slippery clogs and sprinting. It replayed the feel of lifting and shattering the clay pot against Zook’s skull. Pigeons flapped in the rafters.
Zook Junior stepped aside.
I flew over the mud-rutted yard. My clogs struck the wooden porch hard, and when I burst through the door, the wife had already risen to her feet.
Scurrying past me and around to the business side of the counter, Zook seized the conversation by the halter and kept it clean and curried and focused on the basic needs of bleeding heart: soil, moisture, sunlight, planting depth, room to grow. “This is a gift, correct? For a friend, yah?”
“Yes.” A divorced friend, I thought, avoiding the eyes of the downcast wife.
“How nice. A very nice gift.” He brushed the caked dirt from the sides of the clay. His hands trembled. He offered a free packet of slow-release fertilizer; I peevishly declined.
The wife’s eyes darted between her husband and me. Her brow glowered, and it hit me—he does this all the time.
As I handed the money to the wife, our eyes met. Her face was round and wan, slightly plump, lightly lined. Lifelong strangers to mascara, her eyelashes were blond and squeaky clean. She had a greenish-gray circles beneath her eyes, as if her body lacked nourishment, as if she never got enough rest. Or maybe Amish dresses just didn’t come in her shade of blue. She accepted the money in silence, which, for some reason, roused my anger.
“Tell me something,” I said, turning to Zook as if drugged, drunk, or dreaming. I leaned on the counter and swayed like a lioness awakened from sedation. “Doesn’t your faith frown upon extramarital sex?”
The wife slapped my money on the counter, slammed the cash register drawer like a gunshot, and stormed out. The loose ribbons of her little white kapp twirled behind her.
Zook yammered that the Amish took their vows seriously indeed, snatched up the bills, rang up the sale, and dashed after his wife without wishing me so much as a “Gut daag.”
Shaken, I hurried to my red Tercel, set the pot of bleeding heart on the floorboards, and arranged books and boots around so it wouldn’t dump itself, all the while uneasily aware that Zook Junior was watching from the barn.
I was still a young woman and somehow could physically feel a man’s gaze on my body. Perhaps a man’s gaze acted on my mirror neurons, or perhaps it caused something akin to dissociation; it displaced my vantage so that I saw myself from where he stood: I wasn’t simply a female of the species, but a type, what you might call, if it weren’t so pernicious, a “breed,” like an Irish Setter. I was a fair and long-limbed specimen, not muscled for heavy labor. My genes produced height, which, coupled with light musculature, cut an elegant silhouette. Like the American saddlebred, made for “light pleasure driving,” I was a kind favored by social climbers. I was, as one of my girlfriends put it, “Fun to be seen with.”
Young Zook watched my body shut itself in the Tercel and jerk the gear in reverse, his shaved face inscrutable under the shadow of his straw hat. Perhaps he was thinking, What did she expect, going out alone, wearing men’s pants?
Accelerating hard on the open highway, I relished the power to put a few swift miles behind me. Then I let up on the gas.
Mrs. Zook would never know the exhilaration of driving a car.
And she might have stormed out because of me. I broke the silence. It cost me little. I taught writing at Penn State, and some of my female students had researched and written about the Pennsylvania Dutch. From them I knew of special facilities for confining, drugging, and silencing sexual assault victims who spoke out or otherwise upset a way of life that favored perpetrators.1
I had the liberty to toss a wisecrack and skedaddle with a pot of bleeding hearts for a divorced friend who was about to crown herself king of her own condo. The horse breeder’s wife couldn’t. She had too much to lose—family, friends, identity, and entire way of life. She couldn’t pick up her cell phone, rent a UHaul, and hire a divorce attorney, as Lila did, (as I’d soon do), we English, who break our vows over so much less.
1. McClure, Sarah. “The Amish Keep to Themselves. and They’re Hiding a Horrifying Secret.” Type Investigations, Cosmopolitan, 14 Jan. 2020, www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2020/01/14/amish-sexual-abuse-assault/.
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Lisa Lanser Rose is the founder of the award-winning collective, The Gloria Sirens, which promotes literary women. A dog trainer, essayist, and fiction writer, she’s the author of the memoir, For the Love of a Dog and the psychological mystery, Body Sharers, which was a finalist for the PEN / Hemingway Foundation Award for Best First Novel. Her podcast This Animal Life ranked top twenty-five for nature shows. Other honors include the Briar Cliff Review Nonfiction Award, The Florida Review Editor’s Award, finalist for the Southhampton Review Memoir Prize, and a Best American Essay Notable Essay. Her dogs moonwalk throughout the Tampa Bay area.
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Paul Rabinowitz is an author, poet, photographer and founder of ARTS By The People. His works appear in The Sun Magazine, New World Writing, Burningword, Evening Street Press, The Montreal Review, and elsewhere. Rabinowitz was a featured artist in Nailed Magazine in 2020 and Mud Season Review in 2022. He is the author of The Clay Urn, Confluence and Limited Light, a book of prose and portrait photography, which stems from his Limited Light photo series, nominated for Best of the Net in 2021. His poems and fiction are the inspiration for four award-winning films. His first book of poems is truth, love and the lines in between.
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