placed their master's presents on the sack table, on the twigfloor, even beside Martha on the bed. There were iron knives, a roastkid, a basket of peanuts, a sack of roasted coffee beans, a string ofdried fruit, and a tiny earthware flask of perfume. There was even awoolen riga for Aaron, black, suggesting that the Survey had said a bitto the natives about Amish custom; and there were bolts ofbright-patterned cloth too worldly for aught but quilts andinfant-dresses, brightening Martha's eyes.
Aaron stood to accept the guest gifts with elaborate thanks. SarkiKazunzumi as elaborately bemeaned his offerings. "Musa the carpenterwill appear on tomorrow's tomorrow," he said. "You will, the Motherwilling, visit me in Datura tomorrow. We will together purchase lumberworthy of my friend-neighbor's barn-making. May the Mother give youstrength to farm, Haruna! May the Mother grant you the light ofunderstanding!"
"_Sannu, sannu!_" Stoltzfoos responded. He stood at the door of histent, holding his lantern high to watch the Sarki and his servants rideoff into the darkness.
* * * * *
"_Er iss en groesie Fisch, nee?_" Martha asked.
"The biggest fish in these parts," Aaron agreed. "Did you understand ourtalk?"
"The heathen speech is hard for me to learn, Stoltz," Martha admitted,speaking in the dialect they'd both been reared to. "While you had onlythe alien speech to study, I spent my time learning to grow the bugletsand tell the various sorts apart. Besides, _unser guutie DeitschieSchproech, asz unser Erlayser schwetzt, iss guut genunk fa mier_." (Ourhonest German tongue, that our Saviour spoke, is good enough for me).
Aaron laughed. "So _altfashuned_ a _Maedel_ I married," he said. "Woman,you must learn the Hausa, too. We must be friends to these _Schwotzers_,as we were friends with the English-speakers back in the UnitedSchtayts." He pushed aside the bolt of Murnan cloth to sit beside hiswife, and leafed through the pages of their _Familien-Bibel_, pageslovingly worn by his father's fingers, and his grandfather's. "Listen,"he commanded:
"_For the Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooksof water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills;a land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates;a land of oil olive, and honey; a land wherein thou shalt eat breadwithout scarceness, thou shalt not lack any thing in it; a land whosestones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass. When thouhast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the Lord they God for thegood land which He hath given thee._" Aaron closed the big bookreverently. "Awmen," he said.
"Awmen," the woman echoed. "Aaron, with you beside me, I am notfretful."
"And with the Lord above us, I fear not in a strange land," Aaron said.He bent to scrape a handful of earth from beneath Martha's pine-twigcarpet. "_Guuter Gruundt_," he said. "This will grow tall corn. Tobacco,too; the folk here relish our leaf. There will be deep grasses for thebeasts when the snow melts. We will prosper here, wife."
The next morning was cold, but the snowfall had ceased for a spell. TheStoltzfooses had risen well before the dawn; Martha to feed herself, herhusband, and the chickens; Aaron to ready the horse and wagon for a tripinto Datura. He counted out the hoard of golden cowries he'd been loanedas grubstake, did some arithmetic, and allowed his wife to pour him asecond cup of coffee for the road. "You may expect the Sarki's wives tovisit while I'm gone," he remarked.
"I'd be scared half to death!" Martha Stoltzfoos said. Her hands went tothe back of her head, behind the lace prayer covering. "My hair's allstrooby, this place is untidy as an auction yard; besides, how can Italk with those dark and heathen women? Them all decked out in goldenbangles and silken clothes, most likely, like the bad lady of Babylon?Aaron Stoltz, I would admire a pretty to ride into town with you."
"Haggling for hired-help is man's _Bissiniss_." he said. "WhenKazunzumi's women come, feed them pie and peaches from the can. You'llfind a way to talk, or women are not sisters. I'll be back home in timefor evening chores."
* * * * *
Bumping along the trail into Datura, Aaron Stoltzfoos studied the land.A world that could allow so much well-drained black soil to go unfarmedwas fortunate indeed, he mused. He thought of his father's farm, whichwould be his elder brother's, squeezed between railroad tracks and athree-lane highway, pressed from the west by an Armstrong Cork plant,the very cornstalks humming in harmony with the electric lines strungacross the fields. This land was what the old folks had sought inAmerica so long ago: a wilderness ripe for the plow.
The wagon rumbled along the hoof-pocked frozen clay. Aaron analyzed thecontours of the hills for watershed and signs of erosion. He studied thepatterns of the barren winter fields, fall-plowed and showing here andthere the stubble of a crop he didn't recognize. When the clouds scuddedfor a moment off the sun, he grinned up, and looked back blinded to theroad. Good tilth and friendship were promised here, gifts to balanceloneliness. Five years from spring, other Amish folk would come tohomestead--what a barn-raising they'd have! For now, though, he andMartha, come from a society so close-knit that each had always known theyield-per-acre of their remotest cousin-german, were in a land asstrange as the New York City Aaron, stopping in for a phone-call to thevet had once glimpsed on the screen of a gay-German neighbor'sstereo-set.
Datura looked to Aaron like a city from the Bible, giving it a certainvicarious familiarity. The great wall was a block of sunbaked mud, fiftyfeet tall at the battlements, forty feet thick at its base; with bright,meaningless flags spotted on either side of the entrance tower. Thecowhide-shielded gate was open. Birds popped out of mud nests glued tothe mud wall and chattered at Aaron. Small boys wearing too little to bewarm appeared at the opening like flies at a hog-slaughtering to add tothe din, buzzing and hopping about and waving their arms as they calledcompanions to view the black-bearded stranger.
Aaron whoaed his horse and took a handful of _anenes_, coppertenth-penny bits, to rattle between his hands. "_Zonang!_" he shouted:"Come here! Is there a boy amongst you brave enough to ride with anoff-worlder to the Sarki's house, pointing him the way?"
One of the boys laughed at Aaron's slow, careful Hausa. "Let Black-Hat'swhiskers point him the way!" the boy yelled.
"_Uwaka! Ubaka!_" Damning both parents of the rude one, anotheryoungster trotted up to Aaron's wagon and raised a skinny brown fist ingreeting. "Sir Off-Worlder, I who am named Waziri, Musa-the-Carpenter'sson, would be honored to direct you to the house of Sarki Kazunzumi."
"The honor, young man, is mine," Stoltzfoos assured the lad, raising hisown fist gravely. "My name is Haruna, son of Levi," he said, reachingdown to hoist the boy up beside him on the wagon's seat. "Your friendshave ill manners." He giddapped the horse.
"Buzzard-heads!" Waziri shouted back at his whilom companions.
"Peace, Waziri!" Aaron protested. "You'll frighten my poor horse intoconniptions. Do you work for your father, the carpenter?"
"_To_, honorable Haruna," the boy said. "Yes." The empty wagon thumpedover the wheel-cut streets like a wooden drum. "By the Mother, sir, Ihave great knowledge of planing and joining; of all the various sorts ofwood, and the curing of them; all the tools my father uses are asfamiliar to me as my own left hand."
"Carpentry is a skillful trade," Aaron said. "Myself, I am but afarmer."
"By Mother's light! So am I!" Waziri said, dazzled by this coincidence."I can cultivate a field free of all its noxious weeds and touch never afood-plant. I can steer a plow straight as a snapped chalk-string, gradeseed with a sure eye; I can spread manure--"
"I'm sure you can, Waziri," Aaron said. "I need a man of just those rarequalifications to work for me. Know you such a paragon?"
"Mother's name! Myself, your Honor!"
Aaron Stoltzfoos shook the hand of his hired man, an alien conventionthat much impressed Waziri. The boy was to draw three hundred anenes aday, some thirty-five cents, well above the local minimum-wageconventions; and he would get his bed and meals. Aaron's confidence thatthe boastful lad would make a farmer was bolstered by
Waziri's loudcalculations: "Three hundred coppers a day make, in ten day's work, abronze cowrie; ten big bronzes make a silver cowrie, the price of anacre of land. Haruna, will you teach me your off-world farming? Will youallow me to buy land that neighbors yours?"
"_Sei schtill, Buu_," Aaron said, laughing. "Before you reap your firstcrop, you must find me the Sarki."
"We are here, Master Haruna."
* * * * *
The Sarki's house
Blind Man's Lantern Page 3
