oops of joy. Then
Martha joined her husband in happy laughter. Since her tiny-garments
line had been delivered in Low Dutch, the young Murnan chose to believe
that the enthusiastic sounds he heard within the tent reflected joy at
his employment.

* * * * *

It was cold the week the barn was raised, and the mattocks had heavy
work gouging out frozen earth to be heaped into the bank leading up the
back. The Murnan laborers seemed to think midwinter as appropriate as
any other time for building; they said the Mother slept, and would not
be disturbed. Martha served coffee and buttermilk-pop at break-time, and
presided over noontime feasts, served in several sittings, in the tent.
Before the workers left in the evening, Aaron would give each a drink
out back, scharifer cider, feeling that they'd steamed hard enough to
earn a sip of something volatile. There are matters, he mused, in which
common sense can blink at a bishop; as in secretly trimming one's beard
a bit, for example, to keep it out of one's soup; or plucking a guitar
to raise the spirits.

When the fortnight's cold work was done, the Stoltzfoos Farm was like
nothing seen before on Murna. The bank-barn was forty feet high. On its
lee side, Aaron had nailed thin, horizontal strips of wood about a foot
apart, hoping to encourage the mud-daubing birds he'd seen on the wall
at Datura to plaster their nests onto his barn, and shop for insects in
his fields. Lacking concrete, he'd constructed a roofless stone hut
abutting the barn to serve as his manure shed. The farmhouse itself was
a bit gay, having an inside toilet to cheat the Murnan winters and a
sunporch for Martha's bacteriological equipment. As the nearest Amish
_Volle Diener_--Congregational Bishop--was eighty light-years off, and
as the circumstances were unusual, Aaron felt that he and Martha were
safe from the shunning--_Meidung_--that was the Old Order's manner of
punishing Amischers guilty of "going gay" by breaking the church rules
against worldly show.

A third outbuilding puzzled the Murnan carpenters even more than the
two-storied wooden house and the enormous barn. This shed had hinged
sidings that could be propped out to let breezes sweep through the
building. Aaron explained to Musa the function of this tobacco shed,
where he would hang his lathes of long-leafed tobacco to cure from
August through November. The tobacco seedlings were already sprouting in
Mason jar