Kornwolf Read Online Free PDF Page A

laughter—all hooting and “
man, did you see that?
”s and ridicule. Their vehicle rocked to a halt at the edge of the yard. It shrouded the road with exhaust. A clamor of music blared out of it—sounding of rape in a trough, or a freighter derailing.
    One of them shouted, “Nice bowl cut, Zeke!”
    A bottle flew out of the driver’s seat window. It clouted the mailbox.
    Ephraim got up.
    Behind him, the hinny kicked and brayed. It was caught in the crupper, jammed on an angle. The blade wouldn’t give. The animal panicked. Ephraim attempted to calm it with gestures:
easy, now
… He reached for the bridle. The hinny reared. He fell back in the dirt.
    A screech of rubber vaulted the cackling Redcoats south onWeavertown Pike—in between fields of corn and alfalfa, rolling around the bend, then west on Welshtown Road, still blasting that music.
    Ephraim lay on his back, listening.
    Above him, parallel bands of altocumulus clouds drifted over the sky. A cold front was coming. The wind had picked up. There was rain on the way. Before nightfall, probably.
    Allowing his gaze to wander across the overhanging shelf of gray, Ephraim drifted slowly back to earth, dipping below the tree line. Behind him, a waterwheel gently turned, its long arm rising and falling in time, directing a steady trickle of creek water over an aqueduct, into the stables. Beyond, across the gravel drive, a chimney stack rose from a weed-choked garden, dividing the house’s white facade and three separate levels of pine-green shutters. Farther back, in the distance, the oval-shaped side of a barn, with its crumbling trim, sat flush with a wall of tall, old evergreens—after which the wreck of a windmill stood, the fence surrounding it, lined with gulls.
    Ephraim sat up to wipe their gall from his brow. It was starting to burn his skin. He trudged to the creek to dunk his head.
    Inside of the swirl, he listened—as one might press an ear to the railroad track—for
some
intimation of death to the English, whether by famine or flame, to come …
    He emerged with little assurance of hope.
    No, these people would only multiply. Their housing would only continue to spread. The coming years would bring legions of rental cars, neighborhood catfish carts and tour buses—and even more Amish imposter craftsmen, bakers, clerks and buggy ride drivers—stalking the roads for a glimpse of the Plain Folk in whatever context—preferably working; or riding a scooter, even better: for Ephraim, many a slow pursuit down back roads had already left him no option but barreling into the corn for cover. Those occasions would grow more frequent. So would the drive-by camera corps. And the “scenic” motels that had sprung up all over The Basin in recent, the past five, years—as the one that nowbordered the Bontrager property: a ninety-yard wall of linoleum siding, with ten upper-level “observation” platforms that were built and designed for the purpose of “viewing” the local Order at work in the fields—in this case Ephraim alone, as the building had driven off most of their closest neighbors, leaving tourists to settle for the image of a solitary plow boy working his yard. Twenty-five windows per level—and often, at harvest, on weekends, filled, every one of them. Children observed him in vague confusion—as now, with the red-haired kid on the ground floor, pressing his tongue to the window, gurgling—his mother and father standing over him, training their camera’s eye on Ephraim. And worse, in an upstairs window, with little attempt at concealment and zero remorse (not to mention regard or consideration for the Ordnung’s stance on graven images): a video camera perched on a tripod, left unattended to film his whole day …
    Every crop he had ever attempted to grow had been surveyed by English cameras. They felt to be bleeding him thinner each year, as they