Blind Man's Lantern Part 3

When the fortnight's cold work was done, the Stoltzfoos Farm was like nothing seen before on Murna. The bank-barn was forty feet high. On its lee side, Aaron had nailed thin, horizontal strips of wood about a foot apart, hoping to encourage the mud-daubing birds he'd seen on the wall at Datura to plaster their nests onto his barn, and shop for insects in his fields. Lacking concrete, he'd constructed a roofless stone hut ab.u.t.ting the barn to serve as his manure shed. The farmhouse itself was a bit gay, having an inside toilet to cheat the Murnan winters and a sunporch for Martha's bacteriological equipment. As the nearest Amish _Volle Diener_--Congregational Bishop--was eighty light-years off, and as the circ.u.mstances were unusual, Aaron felt that he and Martha were safe from the shunning--_Meidung_--that was the Old Order's manner of punishing Amischers guilty of "going gay" by breaking the church rules against worldly show.

A third outbuilding puzzled the Murnan carpenters even more than the two-storied wooden house and the enormous barn. This shed had hinged sidings that could be propped out to let breezes sweep through the building. Aaron explained to Musa the function of this tobacco shed, where he would hang his lathes of long-leafed tobacco to cure from August through November. The tobacco seedlings were already sprouting in Mason jars on the sunporch window-sills. The bank-barn's bas.e.m.e.nt was also dedicated to tobacco. Here, in midwinter, Aaron and Martha and Waziri would strip, size, and grade the dry leaves for sale in Datura.

Tobacco had always been a prime cash-crop for Levi, Aaron's father.

After testing the bitter native leaf, Aaron knew that his Pennsylvania Type 41 would sell better here than anything else he could grow.

Martha Stoltzfoos was as busy in her new farmhouse as Aaron and Waziri were in the barn. Her kitchen stove burned all day. Nothing ever seen in Lancaster County, this stove was built of fireclay and brick; but the food it heated was honest Deitsch. There were pickled eggs and red beets, ginger tomatoes canned back home, spiced peaches, pickled pears, mustard pickles and chowchow, pickled red cabbage, Schnitz un Knepp, shoo-fly pie, vanilla pie, rhubarb sauce, Cheddar cheeses the size of Waziri's head, haystacks of sauerkraut, slices off the great slab of home-preserved chipped beef, milk by the gallon, stewed chicken, popcorn soup, rashers of bacon, rivers of coffee. In the evenings, protecting her fingers from the sin of idleness, Martha quilted and cross-st.i.tched by lamplight. Already her parlor wall boasted a framed motto that reduced to half a dozen German words, the Amish philosophy of life: "What One Likes Doing is No Work."

For all the chill of the late-winter winds, Aaron kept himself and his young helper in a sweat. Martha's cooking and the heavy work were slabbing muscle onto Waziri's lean, brown frame. Aaron's farming methods, so much different to Murnan routines, puzzled and intrigued the boy. Aaron was equally bemused by the local taboos. Why, for example, did all the politer Murnans eat with the right hand only? Why did the women veil themselves in his presence? And what was this Mother-G.o.ddess worship that seemed to require no more of its adherents than the inclusion of their deity's name in every curse, formal and profane?

"Think what you please, but not too loud," Aaron cautioned himself, and carefully commenced to copy those Murnan speech-forms, gestures, and att.i.tudes that did not conflict with his own deep convictions.

But the soil was his employment, not socializing. Aaron wormed his swine, inspected his horse-powered plow and harrow, gazed at the sun, palpated the soil, and prayed for an early spring to a G.o.d who understood German. Each day, to keep mold from strangling the moist morsels, he shook the jars of tobacco seed, whose hair-fine sprouts were just splitting the hulls.

The rations packaged in Pennsylvania were shrinking. The Stoltzfoos stake of silver and gold cowries was wasting away. Each night, bruised with fatigue, Aaron brought his little household into the parlor while he read from the Book that had bound his folk to the soil. Waziri bowed, honoring his master's G.o.d in his master's manner, but understood nothing of the hard High German: "_For the Lord G.o.d will help me: therefore shall I not be confounded: therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know I shall not be ashamed. Awmen._"

"Awmen," said Martha.

"Awmen," said Waziri, fisting his hand in respect to his friend's bearded G.o.d.

The Murnan neighbors, to whom late winter was the slackest season in the farm-year, visited often to observe and comment on the off-worlder's work. Aaron Stoltzfoos privately regarded the endless conversations as too much of a good thing; but he realized that his answering the Murnan's questions helped work off the obligation he owed the government for the eighty light-years' transportation it had given him, the opportunity he'd been given to earn this hundred acres with five years'

work, and the interest-free loans that had put up his barn and farmhouse.

With Waziri hovering near, Aaron's proud lieutenant, the neighbors would stuff their pipes with native tobacco, a leaf that would have gagged one of Sir Walter Raleigh's Indian friends, while the Amishman lit a stogie in self-defense. Why, the neighbor farmers demanded, did Aaron propose to dust his bean-seeds with a powder that looked like soot? Martha's microscope, a wonder, introduced the Murnans to bacteria; and Aaron tediously translated his knowledge of the nitrogen-fixing symbiotes into Hausa. But there were other questions. What was the purpose of the brush stacked on top of the smooth-raked beds where Aaron proposed to plant his tobacco-seedlings? He explained that fire, second best to steaming, would kill the weed-seeds in the soil, and give the tobacco uncrowded beds to prosper in.

Those needles with which he punctured the flanks of his swine and cattle: what devils did they exorcise? Back to the microscope for an explanation of the disease-process, a sophistication the Murnans had lost in the years since they'd left Kano. What were the bits of blue and pink paper Aaron pressed into mudb.a.l.l.s picked up in the various precincts of his property? Why did those slips oftentime change color, from blue to pink, or pink-to-blue? What was in those sacks of stuff--no dung of animals, but a sort of flour--that he intended to work into his soil? Aaron answered each question as best he could, Waziri supplying--and often inventing--Hausa words for concepts like phosphorous, ascarid worms, and litmus.

Aaron had as much to learn from his brown-skinned neighbors as he had to teach them. He was persuaded to lay in a supply of seed-yams, guaranteeing a crop that would bring bronze cowries next fall in Datura, the price of next year's oil and cloth and tools. The peanut, a legume Aaron had no experience of beyond purchasing an occasional tooth-ful at the grocery-store, won half a dozen acres from Korean lespedeza, the crop he'd at first selected as his soil-improver there. He got acquainted with a plant no Amishman before him had ever sown, a crabgra.s.s called fonio, a staple cereal and source of beer-malt on Murna, imported with the first Nigerian colonists.

Aaron refused to plant any lalle, the henna-shrub from which the Murnans made the dye to stain their women's hands, feeling that it would be improper for him to contribute to such a vanity. Bulrush millet, another native crop, was ill suited to Aaron's well-drained fields. He planned to grow corn, though, the stuff his people called _Welschkarn_--alien corn. Though American enough, maize had been a foreigner to the first Amish farmers, and still carried history in its name. This crop was chiefly for Wutzchen, whose bloodlines, Aaron was confident, would lead to a crop of pork of a quality these heretics from Islam had never tasted before.

Work wasn't everything. One Sunday, after he and Martha had sung together from the _Ausbund_, and Aaron had read from the _Schrift_ and the _Martyr's Mirror_, there was time to play.

Sarki Kazunzumi and several other gentlemen who enjoyed City Hall or Chamber of Commerce standing in Datura had come to visit the Stoltzfooses after lunch; as had Musa the carpenter and his older son, Dauda, Waziri's brother. Also on the premises were about a dozen of the local farmers and craftsmen, inspecting the curious architecture the off-worlder had introduced to their planet. Aaron, observing that the two cla.s.ses of his guests were maintaining a polite fiction, each that the other was not present, had an idea. He'd seen Murnans in town at the midwinter festival, their status-consciousness forgotten in mutual quaffs of fonio-beer or barley-brandy, betting together at horse-races and wheels-of-fortune. "My friends," the Amishman addressed the Murnans gathered in his barn, inspecting Wutzchen, "let's play a game of ball."

Kazunzumi looked interested. As the local Chief of State, the Sarki's approval guaranteed the enthusiasm of all the lesser ranks.

Aaron explained the game he had in mind. It wasn't baseball, an "English" sport foreign to Amishmen, who can get through their teens without having heard of either Comiskey Park or the World Series. Their game, _Mosch Balle_, fits a barnyard better.

In lieu of the regulation softball used in the game of Corner Ball, Martha had st.i.tched together a sort of large beanbag. The playing-field Aaron set up with the help of his visitors was a square some twelve yards on a side, fence-rails being propped up to mark its boundaries and fresh straw forked onto it six inches deep as footing.

Aaron's eight-man team was chosen from the working-stiffs. The opposing eight were the Bra.s.s. To start the game, four of the proletarians stood at the corners of the square; and two men of Kazunzumi's team waited warily within.

Aaron commenced to explain the game. To say that the object of _Mosch Balle_ is for a member of the outer, offensive, team to strike an inner, defensive man with the ball is inadequate; such an explanation is as lacking as to explain baseball as the pitcher's effort to throw a ball so well that it's. .h.i.ttable, and so very well that it yet goes unhit.

Both games have their finer points.

"Now," Aaron told his guests on the field, "we four on the corners will toss the ball back and forth amongst ourselves, shouting _Hah_,_Oh_,_Tay_, with each pitch. Whoever has the ball on _Tay_ has to fling it at one of the two men inside the square. If he misses, he's Out; and one of the other men on our team takes his place. If he hits his target-man, the target's Out, and will be replaced by another man from the Sarki's team.

The team with the last man left on the straw wins the first half. _Des iss der Weeg wie mir's diehne_, O.K.?"

"_Afuwo!_" the Sarki yelled, a woman's call, grinning, crouched to spring aside. "Hah!" Aaron shouted, and tossed the ball to Waziri's older brother, Dauda. "Oh!" Dauda yelled, and threw the ball to the shoemaker. "Tay!" the cobbler exulted, and slammed the ball at the lower-ranking of the two men within the square, the village banker. The shoemaker missed, and was retired.

The Daturans were soon stripped down to trousers and boots, their black torsos steaming in the cold air. Aaron removed his shirt--but not his hat--and so far forgot his Hausa in the excitement that he not only rooted for his teammates in _Pennsylfawnisch Deitsch_, but even punctuated several clumsy plays with raw _Fadomm_'s.

Aaron's skill won the first half for his team. Blooded, the Chamber of Commerce Eight fought through to win the second half. A tie. The play-off saw the Working-Man's League pummeled to a standstill by the C-of-C, who took the laurels with a final slam that knocked Waziri into the straw, protesting that it was an accident.

Sweating, laughing, social status for the moment forgotten, the teams and their mobs of fans surged into the farmhouse to demand of Martha wedges of raisin pie and big cups of strong coffee. As the guests put their rigas and their white caps back on, and a.s.sumed therewith their game-discarded rank of cla.s.s, they a.s.sured Aaron that the afternoon at the ball game had been a large success.

The next day was crisp and cold. With nothing more to be done till the soil thawed, Aaron took Waziri down to the creek to investigate his project of irrigating the hilltop acres. The flow of water was so feeble that the little stream was ice to its channel. "Do you have hereabouts a digger-of-waterholes?" Aaron asked the boy. Waziri nodded, and supplied the Hausa phrase for this skill. "Good. _Wonn's Gottes wille iss_, I will find a spot for them to dig, smelling out the water as can my cousin Blue Ball Benjamin Blank," Aaron said. "Go get from the barn the pliers, the hand-tool that pinches."

Waziri trotted off and brought back the pliers. "What are you up to, Haruna-boss?" he asked. Aaron was holding the bulldog pliers out before him, one handle in each hand, parallel to the ground.

"I am smelling for the well-place," the Amishman said, pacing deliberately across the field. The boy scampered along beside him. "We will need at least one well to be safe from August draught. Cousin Benjamin found the wet depths in this fashion; perhaps it will work for me." Aaron walked, arms outstretched, for half an hour before his face grew taut. He slowed his walking and began to work toward the center of a spiral. Waziri could see the sweat springing up on the young farmer's brow and fingers, despite the cold breeze that blew. The bulldog pliers trembled as though responding to the throbbing of an engine. Suddenly, as though about to be jerked from Aaron's hands, the pliers tugged downward so forceably that he had to lift his elbows and flex his wrists to hold onto them. "Put a little pile of stones here, Waziri," he said.

"We'll have the diggers visit as soon as the ground thaws."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Waziri shook his head. "Haruna, they will not touch soft earth until the first gra.s.s sprouts," he said.

"Time enough," Aaron said. He looked up to satisfy himself that his prospective well-site was high enough to avoid drainage from his pig-yard, then left the Murnan boy to pile up a cairn for the diggers.

It would be good to have a windmill within ear-shot of the house, he mused; its squeaking would ease Martha with a homey sound.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Alone for a few minutes, Aaron retired to the workshop in the cellar of the barn. He planed and sanded boards of a native lumber very like to tulipwood. Into the headboard of the cradle he was making, he keyhole-sawed the same sort of broad Dutch heart that had marked his own cradle, and the cradles of all his family back to the days in the Rhineland, before they'd been driven to America.

Martha Stoltzfoos was speaking Hausa better than she'd spoken English since grade-school days, and she kept busy in the little bacteriological laboratory on her sunporch, keeping fresh the skills she'd learned at Georgetown and might some day need in earnest; but she still grew homesick as her child-coming day drew nearer. It was wrong, she told Aaron, for an Amishwoman to have heathen midwives at her lying-in. For all their kindness, the Murnan women could never be as rea.s.suring as the prayer-covered, black-ap.r.o.ned matrons who'd have attended Martha back home. "Ach, Stoltz," she told her husband, "if only a few other of _unser sart Leit_ could have come here with us."

"Don't worry, Love," Aaron said. "I've eased calves and colts enough into the world; man-children can't come so different."

"You talk like a man," Martha accused him. "I wish my Mem was just down the road a piece, ready to come a-running when my time came," she said.

She put one hand on her ap.r.o.n. "_Chuudes Paste!_ The little rascal is wild as a colt, indeed. Feel him, Stoltz!"

Aaron dutifully placed his hand to sense the child's quickening. "He'll be of help on the farm, so strong as he is," he remarked. Then, tugging his hat down tight, Aaron went outdoors, bashful before this mystery.

The little creek had thawed, and the light of the sun on a man's face almost gave back the heat the air extorted. Waziri had gone to town today for some sort of Murnan spring-festival, eager to celebrate his hard-earned wealth on his first day off in months. The place seemed deserted, Aaron felt, without the boy; without the visitors he'd played ball and talked crops with, striding up in their scarlet-trimmed rigas to gossip with their friend Haruna.

Between the roadway and the house, Aaron knelt to rake up with his fingers a handful of the new-thawed soil. He squeezed it. The clod in his hand broke apart of its own weight: it was not too wet to work.

Festival-day though it was to his _Schwotzer_ neighbors, he was eager to spear this virgin soil with his plow blade.

Aaron strode back to the barn. He hitched Rosina--the dappled mare, named "Raisin" for her spots--to the plow and slapped her into motion.

Sleek with her winter's idleness, Rosina was at first unenthusiastic about the plow; but the spring sun and honest exercise warmed her quickly. Within half an hour she was earning her keep. Though Aaron was plowing shallow, the compact soil broke hard. Rosina leaned into the traces, leaving hoofprints three inches deep. No gasoline tractor, Aaron mused, could ever pull itself through soil so rich and damp.

_Geilsgrefte_, horsepower, was best exerted by a horse, he thought.

The brown earth-smells were good. Aaron kicked apart the larger clods, fat with a planet-life of weather and rich decay. This land would take a good deal of disking to get it into shape. His neighbors, who'd done their heavy plowing just after last fall's first frost, were already well ahead of him. He stabled Rosina at sundown, and went in to sneak a well-earned gla.s.s of hard cider past Martha's teetotaling eye.