"I am smelling for the well-place," the Amishman said, pacing deliberately across the field. The boy scampered along beside him. "We will need at least one well to be safe from August draught. Cousin Benjamin found the wet depths in this fashion; perhaps it will work for me." Aaron walked, arms outstretched, for half an hour before his face grew taut. He slowed his walking and began to work toward the center of a spiral. Waziri could see the sweat springing up on the young farmer's brow and fingers, despite the cold breeze that blew. The bulldog pliers trembled as though responding to the throbbing of an engine. Suddenly, as though about to be jerked from Aaron's hands, the pliers tugged downward so forceably that he had to lift his elbows and flex his wrists to hold onto them. "Put a little pile of stones here, Waziri," he said. "We'll have the diggers visit as soon as the ground thaws."
Waziri shook his head. "Haruna, they will not touch soft earth until the first grass sprouts," he said.
"Time enough," Aaron said. He looked up to satisfy himself that his prospective well-site was high enough to avoid drainage from his pig-yard, then left the Murnan boy to pile up a cairn for the diggers. It would be good to have a windmill within ear-shot of the house, he mused; its squeaking would ease Martha with a homey sound.
Alone for a few minutes, Aaron retired to the workshop in the cellar of the barn. He planed and sanded boards of a native lumber very like to tulipwood. Into the headboard of the cradle he was making, he keyhole-sawed the same sort of broad Dutch heart that had marked his own cradle, and the cradles of all his family back to the days in the Rhineland, before they'd been driven to America.
Martha Stoltzfoos was speaking Hausa better than she'd spoken English since grade-school days, and she kept busy in the little bacteriological laboratory on her sunporch, keeping fresh the skills she'd learned at Georgetown and might some day need in earnest; but she still grew homesick as her child-coming day drew nearer. It was wrong, she told Aaron, for an Amishwoman to have heathen midwives at her lying-in. For all their kindness, the Murnan women could never be as reassuring as the prayer-covered, black-aproned matrons who'd have attended Martha back home. "Ach, Stoltz," she told her husband, "if only a few other of unser sart Leit could have come here with us."
"Don't worry, Love," Aaron said. "I've eased calves and colts enough into the world; man-children can't come so different."
"You talk like a man," Martha accused him. "I wish my Mem was just down the road a piece, ready to come a-running when my time came," she said. She put one hand on her apron. Chuudes Paste! The little rascal is wild as a colt, indeed. Feel him, Stoltz!"
Aaron dutifully placed his hand to sense the child's quickening. "He'll be of help on the farm, so strong as he is," he remarked. Then, tugging his hat down tight, Aaron went outdoors, bashful before this mystery.
The little creek had thawed, and the light of the sun on a man's face almost gave back the heat the air extorted. Waziri had gone to town today for some sort of Murnan spring-festival, eager to celebrate his hard-earned wealth on his first day off in months. The place seemed deserted, Aaron felt, without the boy; without the visitors he'd played ball and talked crops with, striding up in their scarlet-trimmed rigas to gossip with their friend Haruna.