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called him to account for the state of his harvest: a crop being only as good as its master, the master, only as good as his seed, and Ephraim’s tobacco, Lord have mercy, the whole rotting lot of it, sealing that verdict.
    After a season of improper fertilization, drought and multiple parasites, all thirty plants had been cut in the wake of a storm, leading to massive spoilage (soon to be worsened by subsequent overexposure to sunlight to curb the wilting, then speared, too close to the butt on the lathe, then hung to smother and shed-burn high in the rafter beams of a stuffy shack) so that now, including the plow being jammed and the hinny enraged, chewing its bit, the Bontrager home could boast of a haul that would probably roll down to fifty cigars.
    Disgusted, Ephraim charged the gulls. They burst and fluttered, then settled nearby. He slumped back into the dirt on his haunches. He glared at the plow, still lodged on an angle. One of its blades had been caught on a root … The rows of his plot were unworkably crooked. The soil was dry and craggy in spite of hisevery attempt to enrich it with dung. Even Bishop Schnaeder wouldn’t have known what to do with such mistreated land. In horror, the Bishop had already turned to the Minister, Ephraim’s father, to that end: tobacco was the absolute worst crop someone like Ephraim, alone, could hope to produce—as, for one factor: it was hardly profitable; two: it was brutally labor-intensive; and three: no one had taught the boy how to work his land. He did
everything
wrong. Watching the neighbors tend their fields from a distance had only crossed his signals. With the Minister off at the mill by day, and Ephraim an only, motherless child, no one was there to catch his mistakes when he made them. And so, they would only continue.
    Time and again, the Bishop, and others, had appealed to Benedictus on the matter: it was wasteful, they’d argued, for his son to be working at home. He belonged in the fields at harvest.
    But Minister Bontrager hadn’t conceded: the boy would remain on the property, alone. It didn’t appear to matter, at least insofar as the crops were concerned, what he
did
with it—just as long as he watched the house, from dawn to dusk, every day of his life.
    A vehicle topped the hill, approaching. Its engine dropped. Ephraim looked up. It was one of those “pickup” trucks, that’s what they called them—an older model. Obnoxiously large. And faded red … It was slowing down. It had come to a halt. At the edge of the field, it was sitting there now. Slowly, its driver leaned forward and looked at him. Ephraim stared for a moment, annoyed. Then he waved, as though to say
move on—the parking lot’s over there, you moron!
    It worked. The driver, spotting the entrance ahead, moved on. And no sooner gone than a clopping of hooves from the north to replace his engine sounded, at once familiar …
    Jonathan Becker rounded the wall in his topless, two-seated courting buggy. High on the box he roosted, leisurely guiding his groomed and ever-immaculate saddle-bred pacer across and over the small, meandering creek’s stone bridge—one hand on the whip-socket, empty, beside him, the other with reins in a steadiedclench, and the running gear quietly gliding below, oiled from axle to perch, down the shafts—from crupper to bridle, bridle to bellyband, breeching to bit—the entire wagon.
    Jonathan’s penchant for organization infuriated his supper gang members. The Crossbills, all thirteen of them, had never understood it—with Ephraim included among them.
Rumspringa
came only once in life. And, at twenty, Jonathan’s clock was ticking. At the most, he had three more years left to run. Now was no time, in their frame of thought, for tuning equipment or steaming trousers. Or
working
, for that matter, not the way
he
worked—or
had
worked, of late—as an auctioneer. Now was the