dy as an auction yard; besides, how can I
talk with those dark and heathen women? Them all decked out in golden
bangles and silken clothes, most likely, like the bad lady of Babylon?
Aaron Stoltz, I would admire a pretty to ride into town with you."

"Haggling for hired-help is man's _Bissiniss_." he said. "When
Kazunzumi's women come, feed them pie and peaches from the can. You'll
find a way to talk, or women are not sisters. I'll be back home in time
for evening chores."

* * * * *

Bumping along the trail into Datura, Aaron Stoltzfoos studied the land.
A world that could allow so much well-drained black soil to go unfarmed
was fortunate indeed, he mused. He thought of his father's farm, which
would be his elder brother's, squeezed between railroad tracks and a
three-lane highway, pressed from the west by an Armstrong Cork plant,
the very cornstalks humming in harmony with the electric lines strung
across the fields. This land was what the old folks had sought in
America so long ago: a wilderness ripe for the plow.

The wagon rumbled along the hoof-pocked frozen clay. Aaron analyzed the
contours of the hills for watershed and signs of erosion. He studied the
patterns of the barren winter fields, fall-plowed and showing here and
there the stubble of a crop he didn't recognize. When the clouds scudded
for a moment off the sun, he grinned up, and looked back blinded to the
road. Good tilth and friendship were promised here, gifts to balance
loneliness. Five years from spring, other Amish folk would come to
homestead--what a barn-raising they'd have! For now, though, he and
Martha, come from a society so close-knit that each had always known the
yield-per-acre of their remotest cousin-german, were in a land as
strange as the New York City Aaron, stopping in for a phone-call to the
vet had once glimpsed on the screen of a gay-German neighbor's
stereo-set.

Datura looked to Aaron like a city from the Bible, giving it a certain
vicarious familiarity. The great wall was a block of sunbaked mud, fifty
feet tall at the battlements, forty feet thick at its base; with bright,
meaningless flags spotted on either side of the entrance tower. The
cowhide-shielded gate was open. Birds popped out of mud nests glued to
the mud wall and chattered at Aaron. Small boys wearing too little to be
warm appeared at the opening like flies at a hog-slaughtering to add to
the din, buzzing and hopping about and w