P. L. Gaus’s Ohio Amish Journal

Would you hang laundry out to dry in winter?  Sure, if you were Amish.  The question is how do you wash it first?  Remember the old ringer-washers?  If the answer is yes, you’ve dated yourself.  The ones I remember were mostly electric, though, and many Amish forsake the use of gasoline generators for such appliances, using only those square galvanized wash and rinse tubs, often with a corrugated washboard and a hand agitator, too:

(http://www.lehmans.com/store/Home_Goods___Laundry).

How does that sound for an afternoon’s labor?  And remember – for a large family, that’s probably every afternoon.

In my Ohio Amish Mysteries, soon to be republished as the Amish-Country Mysteries by Plume (a division of Penguin Group USA), the old red-brick Holmes County Jail is featured prominently, and I thought my readers might like to see what it looks like. Here is a picture taken just a few years ago, after Holmes County moved its real jail to a modern facility in the countryside north of town.

Just inside the main door to the right is where I placed Ellie Troyer-Niell’s front counter, and that window on the first floor at the right corner of the building is where I put Sheriff Bruce Robertson’s large office. Many of my characters (Professor Michael Branden, the sheriff, and Pastor Caleb Troyer) have stood looking out from that window, to think or talk about a case.

The rest of courthouse square is taken up by the sandstone courthouse (off-camera to the left) and the tall civil war monument (off-camera to the right), and I’ll soon post photographs of those, too, so you can see the locations where many of my Millersburg scenes are set. In months to come, I’ll try to post photos of other scenes from my novels.

For the aggravated murder of Barbara Weaver, Barbara Raber of Millersburg, Ohio, has been sentenced by Judge Robert J. Brown to twenty-three years to life in prison.  This happened several days ago in Wayne County (Ohio) court, and I’ve taken the time since then to think about this.

At the time the verdict was announced on September 22, 2009, Raber said time and again that she didn’t do it.  Her attorney presented the plausible alternative scenario that Weaver’s husband Eli actually killed his wife in the early morning hours of June 2, 2009, before leaving on a fishing trip with friends.  The coroner’s best estimate of the range for time of death does fit this theory, but the jury still convicted Raber, and the judge at sentencing said, “You were involved in the death of Barbara Weaver.  There is no evidence to contradict that.”  The judge also expressed the opinion that Raber’s sentence ought to have some “parity” with that of Eli Weaver (fifteen years to life), who earlier pleaded guilty to the charge of complicity to commit murder, before testifying for the prosecution.

Is that then a clean verdict and a reasonable sentence?  Maybe so, but also maybe not.  Holmes County residents have expressed the opinion to me that this case is more complicated than it appears.  That certainly is what the defense presented in court.  But Judge Brown said at the time of sentencing, “You and Mr. Weaver had a strong role in the death of his wife.  Without your cooperation, she would still be alive today.”

I think he was right. I think we have justice.  But is it flawless?  Probably not.

What catches your eye in this picture of a typical Holmes County Amish homestead?  Is it the two houses, the main house plus one for the retired grandparents and perhaps an unmarried brother or sister?  How about the windmill on the hill?  There are the usual outbuildings and white fences.  There are draft horses in the pasture and several features not easy to see unless you can enlarge the image: Martin houses, grape arbors, laundry drying on lines under the porch roofs, and flower and vegetable gardens around the house.

But what do you not see that also makes this so typically Amish?  It is the absences that I notice – no TV antenna or cable, no telephone wires, no electricity coming into the house from a pole out by the road.

We see these types of houses all over Holmes County, Ohio, and you can see versions of it anywhere in America where the Amish have settled.  I hear of new settlements everywhere I go to speak about my Ohio Amish Mysteries. If there is a settlement of Amish people near you, I’d sure like to read about it, if you find the vast outward migration of Amish people into the rest of the country as fascinating as I do.

Land is now so expensive in Holmes County that many Amish people are forming settlements in other states.  There is a new settlement, for instance,  north of Batavia, New York.  I met the bishop of that group at a library talk I gave near there last March.  He had moved his group up to New York from our Mt. Hope area, and when he told me where his old farm had been, I knew right where it was.

So, if you have Amish people living in your area, I’d be pleased if you would post a comment.  I think we’ll all be surprised by how many new settlements there are in America.

I have posted several times about the Amish murder we suffered here in Wayne County, Ohio, and now the trial of Barbara Raber for the murder of Barbara Weaver has run for three days, Thursday and Friday last week, and Monday this week, plus a fourth day of trial to come today.  This should be the day for final arguments.

Last Thursday the jury was seated, and opening arguments were heard.  On Friday the principal prosecution witness was Eli D. Weaver, husband of the murdered Barbara Weaver of Maysville, Ohio.  Eli has already pleaded guilty to the charge of complicity to commit murder.

Yesterday the arresting officers and detectives testified about Barbara Raber and about text messages sent between Eli and her before and after the murder.  Raber testified that she went to the Weaver house just to scare Barbara, but the gun went off accidentally.  She also testified that she went along with Eli’s schemes to murder his wife just to see how far he was willing to go with the conspiracy.

So Amish history in Holmes County is now just as commonplace as the typical human condition.  I shouldn’t be surprised.  Amish people aren’t saints; they are, after all, only people.  They hold to a higher religious standard than most of us, but perhaps it is just a different religious standard, not necessarily a better one.  They believe God intends us all to live as peasant farmers, and they put their beliefs into practice.  So there is no hypocrisy here to charge on the question of lifestyle.

But now there is a very real Amish murder charge, and that is a game changer for us who live among them, especially for writers like me.  I write the Ohio Amish Mysteries, and the game changer is that now there can very believably be an Amish murder.   There can also very believably be an Amish person on trial for murder.  We have such a thing, right here in Wayne County, Ohio.

Life in Holmes County, Ohio, can be as serene as a drive through the country.  If you are brothers with a horse and buggy, you probably have it better, on the scale of serenity, than most of the rest of us.  Amish life does have its advantages.  I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone, but you can see how it might be peaceful.

Facing the charge of aggravated murder with a gun specification, Eli Weaver has pleaded instead to complicity to commit murder, and the gun specification has been removed from the charge.  In this infamous case, Weaver’s wife was murdered in her sleep, allegedly by Weaver’s accomplice, Barbara Raber, who now faces trial for aggravated murder.  Eli is expected to testify for the prosecution.

I have written recently about this tragic case in Holmes County, Ohio, where Raber lived, and Wayne County to the north, where Eli and Barbara Weaver lived.  It is the type of murder I never thought I would see, when I first began to design and write the Ohio Amish Mysteries.

Eli Weaver’s picture was in Wooster’s Daily Record this morning, and he looks like any typical Amish fellow one might see in this part of Ohio.  But he had been shunned by the time of his wife’s murder, because he was involved in sexual affairs with a number of women, and because he had allegedly discussed his wife’s murder several times with other people.

Thus half of the puzzle of Barbara Weaver’s murder is finished.  Now we wait for the trial of Barbara Raber.

And I have to shake my head.  That murder took place in Maysville, Ohio, which is a barely definable town on Harrison Road in southern Wayne County, where some of the events in my Ohio Amish Mystery Separate From the World were set.  And when I think of Maysville, I remember the places there, where I like to visit.  There is the one-room school house on the corner of Harrison and Mt. Hope roads.  I like the Schlabaugh furniture store just east of there.  The Raber furniture shop just south of that intersection is one of the best places for roll-top desks.  And the little market right next door (closed on Thursdays) is so quintessentially Amish that I surely ought to have used it already in one of my mysteries.  Then just at the border with Holmes County, there is a new parochial school being built for the Amish kids of the area.  They had the softball diamond and backstop finished before the school was done, but it will all be ready for school in a couple of weeks.

I think time will help to erase the thoughts I have of murder there, but for a while at least, Maysville will not be the same to me.  Sadly, it used to be a favorite spot of mine.  The photos in my blog A Sure Sign of Spring were taken less than half a mile from Maysville.  Maybe I’ll go back next spring and find those same sugar buckets hanging from the maple trees.  Or find those same kids playing softball at the nearby school.  Or maybe I’ll just go back today, and try to reclaim some of the peacefulness I remember there, hoping and praying that any further murders involving Holmes County Amish folk happen only in my mystery novels.

The wheat is in this year, and it seems as if there was much more of it planted in Holmes County than usual. In fields nearly everywhere one turns, the crop has been cut, and the sheaves have been shocked, stacked that is, as in the picture. Oats, barely, and other grains are done the same way, and late in the fall, the field corn will be put up too.

It usually takes the whole family working together to harvest a field as big as this one. Even the kids who aren’t big enough to help, really, are often out with the family in the field. I’ve seen men with scythes cutting by hand, women and children following along behind to gather six bundles, which are then tented together, with a last sheave spread out over the top as a cover. That makes the shock.

I have never stopped long to watch, because it’d be too intrusive to just stare at a family at work, but this is quiet work, and it is hard. It is also extraordinarily peaceful. Living this close to the earth has its rewards, even if it does involve hard work.

I have been writing the Ohio Amish Mysteries for ten years now, and at talks I have given about my novels, I have always admitted to my audience that I make a rather obvious bargain with my readers – it will never be an Amish person who commits a murder in one of my stories. It just wouldn’t happen, and I wouldn’t want to write about it if it did. In the kind of story I write, I always figured that the fiction ought to imitate Amish lifestyle and culture faithfully, and since there had never been an Amish-involved murder in Holmes County, I considered myself safe in my assumptions.

But that all changed this spring, and now sadly life has imitated fiction in a way that has set me back as a writer, at least for a while. I haven’t been able to make progress recently on the seventh Ohio Amish Mystery (tentatively titled “Harmless as Doves”) because now four Amish people in Holmes County Ohio have been murdered in two separate incidents, apparently by other Amish people. The tragedy of this so completely dislodged me from my creative state that I have not written a word for three months.

In the first incident, a father apparently killed his son, his wife, and himself. In the second incident, a man’s girlfriend apparently killed his wife so that they could leave the Amish life and enjoy modern conveniences. So the world was turned upside down for me, and it took a couple of trips out of state to put my mind back in the creative condition I need to finish my seventh novel.

We first went south to the islands and “got out there” as they say, into the warm weather, the tropical waters, and the gentler mindsets of the Caribbean. There I am in the first picture, soaking in one of the pools on Royal Caribbean’s Freedom of the Seas. They say it is currently the biggest cruise ship in the world, and I believe it. We were on the boat for seven days, and I saw only 40 percent of the thing.

Then we came home, packed the camper, and headed to Michigan’s “Up North” regions, where we needed jackets every night and warm clothes most of the days. In the second picture, I’ve found a peaceful chair at a campfire early in our first week out. We spent nearly three weeks up near Michigan’s “Tip of the Mitt” as they call it, and between the two excursions, I seem to have purged the mental sluggishness that was caused by the cruel reality of four non-fictional Amish-involved murders.

Now I’ll get back to the earnest business of finishing Harmless as Doves, which I started in January. I think I can now live with the irony that this is a story about a murder committed by an Amish lad, over a dispute about a girlfriend. Knowing that plot line, perhaps you can see why the new homicidal realities in Holmes County rocked me so hard.

The sap is running in Holmes County, Ohio, and you can see the taps Amish people have put out in stands of maple trees.  I took this photograph on Mt. Hope Road, just south of Route 250.  I could hear the sap dripping into the buckets while I stood there to take the picture.  They have a sign out at this Amish farm advertising eggs for sale, and I know they also sell baskets from their front porch in the summer time.  I think I’ll stop this summer to ask if they sell maple syrup, too.

Just down the road from there, I found a softball game under way behind a school house, and I took this photograph from a considerable distance.  We stopped to watch for a while, and I can tell you these kids were just as intent on winning their game as professional athletes might be.

I don’t know which of these is the better sign of spring, but I’ll take either one happily, given the severe winter we’ve had in Ohio.