Kornwolf Read Online Free PDF Page B

time to imbibe and partake. And to chase after women. Beautiful women …
    He should’ve been savoring every moment.
    His buggy swung into the Bontrager lane. Clearing the stables, it slowed to a halt. He dismounted. He adjusted the blinds of his pacer, then, turning to Ephraim, flashed a grin.
    â€œAch!” he exclaimed in English. “Look at the state of you, Bontrager. Wonderful soiled.”
    Ephraim glared in silence, streaked with gall and manure.
    Jonathan caught himself. “Sorry.” He switched to Pennsyltucky Dutch: “
All right, then. It’s payday at market. You coming?
”
    Leaving the hinny on the plow in the yard, they got into the buggy and started south. Ephraim would have to return in an hour, ahead of The Minister. Plenty of time.
    Pulling away from the house, they ascended the gradual slope of Eshelman’s Hill. Charlock and pennycress spilled from the ditches on either side like wild ivy. Leveling out, a gentle plateau stretched on toward a rising bluff to the west—crowned with a plot of forgotten tombs, their headstones dating to 1750—while off to the east, maybe two hundred yards through a stretch of evenly cropped stubble: a wall of oak and hickory forest, its eco-tone jumbled with barren thickets—what used to be Isaac Tanner’s woods, before the family had moved to Ohio. The English couple who’d bought their house had let the property run to seed. The fence surrounding their barn had crumbled. Tent worms had eatentheir giant oak. And, after the turn onto Welshtown Road, piles of garbage marred their lawn.
    Continuing on, there unfolded a more pristine expanse of unsullied farmland. Holstein cattle on the hillsides, grazing in black and white. A wind of manure. Fields of alfalfa in yellow and green. A patchwork of District Seven at harvest: devoid of the Redcoats, if only in stretches. Layers of orange and magenta, stratums of brown and puce and viridian green washed over in cooling, violet hues with the rolling approach of an evening shower. Storage silos appeared on the tree line. A Lutheran steeple was nestled among them—stable yards, orchards and farms below, all of them teeming with harvest activity. Every hand in the valley was out. Those who had already brought in their corn were now sowing the last of the year’s alfalfa. Horse-drawn wagons appeared on all sides. Crews of men and women and children labored in packs, with the gulls at their heels.
    With no sign of traffic, Jonathan drifted slowly into the middle of the road. He straddled the center line, easing up on the reins. On their nearing the Ziegler farm, a white picket fence loomed up to their left. It ran toward a water tank and onward to a barn, where three or four members of the family were manning a cutter that chopped and blew corn to storage. Above, from a second-level window of the barn, across the yard to the porch of the house, ran a clothesline, hung with the customary black and white and blue of the Orderly vestiture. Below, young Katie Ziegler was driving a push-mower over the lawn in starts. Jonathan smiled as they drifted by. He winked at her, then pulled back to his lane.
    â€œ
So
,” he finally broke the silence in Py. Dutch, leaning forward. “
I don’t know if anyone told you what happened
…”
    He launched right into recounting the previous weekend’s stomp at the Metzler barn—how somebody, one of their English neighbors, presumably, had called the police to complain, how Officer Beaumont and three other deputies had driven their cruisers right up on the lawn—how everyone had scattered and broken for cover—some for the corn in a wild dash, others back intothe barn for a hiding place, down in the stables or up on the roof—how four of the Crossbills—Gideon, Isaac, Samuel and Colin—had been arrested and held at the precinct until the next morning, and how they would now be obliged to attend an alcohol