s on the sunporch window-sills. The bank-barn's basement 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-stitched
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-goddess
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
attitudes 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 God who
understood German. Each day, to keep mold from strangling the moist
morsels, he shook