Dawn put her hand on his back. “You are, Jed.”
“I don’t know,” Jed repeated. “Maybe I’m more like my brother.”
“I know you both,” Dawn said. “And I love your brother. He’s been like a father to me. But you and he are nothing alike, Jed.”
“He brought me here. He planned all of this so that I’d join in the fight with him,” Jed said.
Dawn pursed her lips. “I don’t think so. He brought you here, for sure. And there’s no doubt that he’s been using you to help the resistance. That part is also true. But he hasn’t asked you to fight.”
Jed didn’t say anything for a while after that. They walked on, and after a short spell he took her hand and squeezed it. “I would very much like to marry you, Dawn. Wherever we end up.” He smiled at her. “I’ll be Amish wherever I am, I know that. And I hope you know that too.”
They walked up to a large clearing that looked very familiar to Jed. There were a few low rises that seemed out of place, but if he didn’t know better, he’d have said that this land could have been the location of his family’s farm.
“I brought you here on purpose,” Dawn said. “I thought you would recognize it.” She put her hands behind her back as they walked. “I thought you might be ready to see it.”
Jed didn’t speak as he looked around. He wasn’t sure what he thought about seeing the place.
“I was raised Amish,” Dawn said.
Jed’s attention was on the land—he was trying to compare it with his memories of his old farm—but when he realized that Dawn was being serious, he turned to her. “You were raised Amish?” Jed asked. “What happened?”
“My father left the Amish when I was ten years old. After my mother died.” Dawn looked down at the ground and shuffled her feet. “He wasn’t excommunicated or anything. He just said he couldn’t stand to see the Amish life continue without her. Like it sullied his memory of her or something. It never did make sense to me.”
Jed didn’t know what to say to that.
“You don’t have to say anything,” Dawn said, as if she’d read his mind. “It’s just something that happened. I guess that’s why I married so young, and married a former Amish boy.”
“Ben Beachy?” Jed said.
“Yeah. Ben.”
“He died?”
“Yes. In this war.” Dawn walked up the long, weed-strewn drive that led onto the empty property. “He was Pook’s best friend. Billy is Ben’s younger brother. The three of them were inseparable.”
Jed just nodded. He still didn’t know what to say, and it didn’t seem like Dawn expected him to say anything. It was like she was unburdening her soul. Like she was clearing the decks so that her relationship with him could go forward unhindered. So he just let her talk.
“Billy was in love with me too,” Dawn said. “Still is, I think. There could never be anything between us, though. But we both loved Ben very much. I think of Billy as if he were my brother.” She nodded very faintly, as if giving herself permission to admit something. “In that way, he is my brother.”
“Having a brother can be tough,” Jed said.
“Yes. And pretty great.”
“Yes.”
As they walked up the lane, Jed was getting the strong feeling that he’d been on this property before. The bend of the road, even though it was unkempt and covered over with weeds, was very familiar to him.
“I was ordered to make you fall in love with me, Jed,” Dawn said. “Might as well get it all out in the open at once.”
Jed stopped and looked at her. It was all so overwhelming, so he just blinked and nodded his head. Somehow he knew that what she was saying was the truth.
Dawn pulled him by his hands until he took a reluctant step toward her. “But that doesn’t mean I didn’t really fall in love with you.”
“So how does it stand with us now?” Jed asked.
“I love you,” Dawn said.
“I love you, too.”
“This is my old farm,” Jed said, and pointed out at the land. “It just feels like it. It has to be. I halfway recognize some of the trees, though they’re a lot larger than I remember.”
Dawn didn’t say anything for a few moments. They walked up onto a low hill that seemed to have been made artificially.
“This would be where the barn was,” Jed said.
Dawn just nodded.
“What happened to it all?” Jed asked.
“Fire,” Dawn said.
“Everything?” Jed asked. “Everything burned?”
“Twenty percent of the homes and other structures burned down when the community first got here.”
“The community?”
“The whole thing. The entire Amish Zone,” Dawn said.
“I don’t get it,” Jed said. “If this is my old farm, then it has always been here.”
Dawn shook her head. “You’ll need to talk to Amos to get all the details.”
“Are you saying the whole community, land and all, was somehow transported here from the old world?”
Dawn nodded. “Talk to your brother, Jed.”
(33
ANOTHER EARTH
TUESDAY
The next morning, the Amish women from the community showed up to clean and work on Matthias’s little house. This was a common practice in plain communities, a unifying tradition that, renewed generation by generation, tied the people together and made everyone’s life easier. Even weekly worship meetings are held house to house, every other weekend, so that a different family hosts the meeting each time. Every two weeks, on the weekend when a meeting was scheduled to be held, a group of community members would show up at the host’s house—usually on Friday afternoon—and the home would be readied for the meeting. Needful repairs would be made, no questions asked. Sprucing up, sometimes even including major projects, would be completed so that the house would be ready for the Sunday meeting.
On the Saturday afternoon before a typical Sunday meeting, a wagon appears at the host’s home. In the wagon are all of the portable pews for the Sunday fellowship. The pews are unloaded, and the wagon is carefully re-loaded with furniture from the parts of the house that are to be used for the meeting. Then the pews are arranged in the vacated rooms. In this way, the plain people believe that they are carrying on the practices of the Apostles and the early Church in holding their fellowship meetings house to house.
The cleaning going on in Matthias’s house, however, was not for a scheduled Sabbath meeting. This was instead for the barn-raising scheduled for Saturday. On this Tuesday morning in Matthias’s cottage, screens were fixed, blinds were dusted, and the whole house was given a thorough cleaning from top to bottom. Dawn joined in, and spent most of the day chatting and making friends with the young Amish women from the community, many of whom were close to her age. Though she’d been raised Amish, she’d been gone for many years, and was surprised to find out that the Amish girls were so goofy and full of joy. They joked around a lot, and teased one another incessantly. And even though Dawn was dressed in Amish garb, the girls all called her “The Englischer,” but they did so with a wink and a smile. Overall, she felt very comfortable with the girls of the community. That is, until two of the girls asked her about Jed.
For the most part, this was a forbidden thing in an Amish society, this talking about an unmarried young man. Girls did not talk about boys, except maybe to their closest sisters. Dawn was a little surprised that in this young colony, the girls seemed to be more forward about male/female relationships than she remembered from her own district back in the old world. In most traditionalist districts, there was no talk at all about relationships between men and women. Most people (even parents and siblings) found out that a young couple was in love at the moment they announced their marital intentions to the family. But that had been a long time ago.