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 jars on the sunporch window-sills. The bank-barn's basement was also dedicated to tobacco. Here, in midwinter, Aaron and Martha and Waziri would strip, size, and grade the dry leaves for sale in Datura. Tobacco had always been a prime cash-crop for Levi, Aaron's father. After testing the bitter native leaf, Aaron knew that his Pennsylvania Type 41 would sell better here than anything else he could grow.
Martha Stoltzfoos was as busy in her new farmhouse as Aaron and Waziri were in the barn. Her kitchen stove burned all day. Nothing ever seen in Lancaster County, this stove was built of fireclay and brick; but the food it heated was honest Deitsch. There were pickled eggs and red beets, ginger tomatoes canned back home, spiced peaches, pickled pears, mustard pickles and chowchow, pickled red cabbage, Schnitz un Knepp, shoo-fly pie, vanilla pie, rhubarb sauce, Cheddar cheeses the size of Waziri's head, haystacks of sauerkraut, slices off the great slab of home-preserved chipped beef, milk by the gallon, stewed chicken, popcorn soup, rashers of bacon, rivers of coffee. In the evenings, protecting her fingers from the sin of idleness, Martha quilted and cross-stitched by lamplight. Already her parlor wall boasted a framed motto that reduced to half a dozen German words, the Amish philosophy of life: "What One Likes Doing is No Work."
For all the chill of the late-winter winds, Aaron kept himself and his young helper in a sweat. Martha's cooking and the heavy work were slabbing muscle onto Waziri's lean, brown frame. Aaron's farming methods, so much different to Murnan routines, puzzled and intrigued the boy. Aaron was equally bemused by the local taboos. Why, for example, did all the politer Murnans eat with the right hand only? Why did the women veil themselves in his presence? And what was this Mother-goddess worship that seemed to require no more of its adherents than the inclusion of their deity's name in every curse, formal and profane? "Think what you please, but not too loud," Aaron cautioned himself, and carefully commenced to copy those Murnan speech-forms, gestures, and attitudes that did not conflict with his own deep convictions.
But the soil was his employment, not socializing. Aaron wormed his swine, inspected his horse-powered plow and harrow, gazed at the sun, palpated the soil, and prayed for an early spring to a God who understood German. Each day, to keep mold from strangling the moist morsels, he shook the jars of tobacco seed, whose hair-fine sprouts were just splitting the hulls.
The rations packaged in Pennsylvania were shrinking. The Stoltzfoos stake of silver and gold cowries was wasting away. Each night, bruised with fatigue, Aaron brought his little household into the parlor while he read from the Book that had bound his folk to the soil. Waziri bowed, honoring his master's God in his master's manner, but understood nothing of the hard High German: "For the Lord God will help me: therefore shall I not be confounded: therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know I shall not be ashamed. Awmen."
"Awmen," said Martha.
"Awmen," said Waziri, fisting his hand in respect to his friend's bearded God.
The Murnan neighbors, to whom late winter was the slackest season in the farm-year, visited often to observe and comment on the off-worlder's work. Aaron Stoltzfoos privately regarded the endless conversations as too much of a good thing; but he realized that his answering the Murnan's questions helped work off the obligation he owed the government for the eighty light-years' transportation it had given him, the opportunity he'd been given to earn this hundred acres with five years' work, and the interest-free loans that had put up his barn and farmhouse.