Mathias laughed. “You sound like the English, or some young Amish girl wanting to get married.”
Jed smiled, “I like to get ideas.”
“An Amish farm is an Amish farm.” Matthias stuck his knife into the jar of preserves and pulled out a dollop of jam, then winked at Jed as he stuck the sugary mass in his mouth. He sat the knife down and twisted the lid back on the jar. “Well, this Sabbath is Visitation Sabbath. We could always go over there and ask to look around.”
“That’s two days from now,” Jed said. “Any way we could do it sooner?”
Matthias wiped his knife on his broadfall pants, then closed the blade and tucked it back into his pants’ inner pocket. “I suppose we could go tomorrow, but it’ll look odd. Nobody visits on Saturday.”
“Who cares if it looks odd?” Jed said. “Let’s do it.”
Matthias stood up and pushed in his chair. “All right, I’ll talk to Marcus at the meeting tonight. But for now… you’ve been napping while I finished the plowing. So you get dishes duty while I go do the evening milking. If we can get all of our chores done before the meeting, maybe we can make a few more fat lamps after we get home so we can get more light in this dreary place.”
“Now who sounds like a woman?” Jed said as he slapped Matthias on the shoulder. “No, I’m thinking of turning in early.”
“After the meeting?”
“After the meeting.”
“And after you napped the day away?” Matthias laughed.
“I’m starting to appreciate the value of a lot of rest,” Jed said as he began to clear away the dishes.
When the chores were finished and Matthias had filtered the milk, Jed helped his friend pour the finished product into sterilized five-gallon canisters. The canisters were then loaded into the buckboard wagon, and the two young men harnessed the horses and drove the milk over to the neighbor’s farm. The clip-clop of the horses’ hooves on the road was soothing, and Jed remembered riding in the buggy with his parents as a little boy, how he’d sing or make up rhymes that went with the beat of horse travel. He recalled traveling in the winter as a child—burrowing into the lap blanket and wishing that nothing would ever change in his perfect life, that his parents would always be there with him. These thoughts brought on a feeling of nostalgia and melancholy like a fog, which only lifted when they’d pulled the wagon up to the neighbor’s barn.
Tom Hochstetler helped the two carry the canisters into his stone springhouse, and the milk containers were lowered into the icy water that flowed around the stone trough built into the wall of the springhouse. The pure, cool water came from a spring, flowed through the troughs, then down into a large cistern that served for the Hochstetlers’ animal-watering needs. An overflow in the cistern routed the water back into a small creek that flowed down to a stock pond.
The milk would be bartered for lumber and supplies, to be stored up for Matthias’ barn-raising, which was coming up soon. Altogether, Matthias was hopeful that when the time came for the barn-raising, he’d already be free of any debt related to the construction. Jedediah was hopeful too. He was looking forward to the fellowship time, because barn-raisings provided some of the fondest memories from his childhood.
Later that evening, Matthias sat by lantern light at the oaken kitchen table in his tiny house, and Jedediah excused himself for the evening. He was anxious to go to bed, not because he was sleepy—he wasn’t tired at all—but because there were things he needed to know, and the only place he felt comfortable accessing his BICE was in his own room, lying on the fleeces.
The meeting earlier that evening had taken place at the house of Arthur Lapp. Standing outside with the other Amish men beforehand, Jed had felt the intense stares coming at him; Matthias had warned him that people were suspicious because Jed’s brother was head of the resistance. No one was openly rude, although speakers did tend to point in his direction whenever they spoke about TRACE and whether or not the rebels had set off the bomb that destroyed the City.
Jed had been surprised to see so many young faces there, even though he’d been told by Mr. Zook at the immigration center to expect it. The average age of the men who attended the meeting was probably around twenty-five. And when the meeting was brought to order, Jed noticed that the elders, all seated along one wall, were perhaps only a year or two older than the rest of the group, on average.
The meeting was conducted in English, and since most everyone was young, the English that was used was fairly modern and would have been considered “worldly” back in his home district. It made it easier for Jed to follow along; he didn’t like it when meetings were held in either Pennsylvania Dutch or the weird hybridized slang that was often used by his elders in the AZ back home.
Ultimately, nothing concrete was decided. The meeting served more as a forum for airing out pent-up stress and pressure than it did as a call to action. There was a lot of complaining and accusing going on, but the group, and even the elders, were evenly split in their opinions about who was to blame for the bombing, and whether or not the community should continue to trade with the rebels. Tensions eased once the topic changed to giving aid and comfort to those who’d lost loved ones in the bombing, and the meeting took on a more temperate feel.
The last major topic for discussion was Matthias’s barn-raising. It was a bittersweet thing for Matthias to learn that, since another family who’d planned a barn-raising for the next week had been killed in the destruction of the City, Matthias’s barn-raising was now moved up. It would be held in eight days, the following Saturday. Moving the barn-raising up a month would create some tactical difficulties, but Matthias was excited about the prospect just the same.
Jed noticed that the Yoders were not present or represented at the meeting by anyone else from their family. He found that curious, especially if they were truly working for Transport, but he still didn’t know what to do with that piece of information. He hoped to learn more on his next excursion into the cyber-world.
Toward the end of the evening, the floor was opened up to anyone who had anything to say, so Jed decided that it would be as good a time as any to introduce himself, and to perhaps assuage some fears and concerns about his presence among the people in the community.
“I haven’t been here long,” he said. “And I’m still trying to learn everything that’s happened here in New Pennsylvania, and even about my brother’s role in it. As you can imagine, I’m very lost right now, and I don’t really know what to think. Still, I am Amish. I was born Amish, and I intend to die that way. Understanding all of this is something I struggle with, and I know that peace and comfort may be long in coming. I do appreciate all the love and care I’ve received since I first arrived, and I hope to be a productive member of the community here. I thank you all for your patience and kindness.”
When he finished, one of the elders rose to speak. “You do know that your brother has violated both our ordnung, and every other rule we have as a people, by choosing to fight and to make war against the government?”
“I know that,” Jed responded.
“And you know that we have chosen to remove him from our number, as we must do, and that he has been shunned from the fellowship of the beloved?”
“I do.”
“All right, then. This meeting is adjourned. May God’s grace be upon all of us.”
(24
AT10S
Lying on his bunk among the fleeces, Jed prayed to God to watch over him before focusing his thoughts in order to enter his BICE control room. Before retiring to his bed, he’d downed a full glass of lemonade brought over by the Yoders, knowing that the drink would likely be laced with more Q. It was.