Читать книгу Kornwolf - Tristan Egolf - Страница 12

The carload of Redcoats had just appeared when the one-man plow beneath him jammed, and Ephraim, thrown from its plank in a splay of appendages, pitched facedown in the dirt. A flock of gulls burst up all around him; scattered from picking alfalfa seeds out of the crooked and twisting wake of the plow. They hovered above him, cawing defiantly. Already caked in manure, he lashed at them—only to meet with a splatter of gall. Streaks of it blotted his face and chest, his trousers. Squinting, he rubbed his eyes.

The carload of English erupted with laughter—all hooting and “man, did you see that?”s and ridicule. Their vehicle rocked to a halt at the edge of the yard. It shrouded the road with exhaust. A clamor of music blared out of it—sounding of rape in a trough, or a freighter derailing.

One of them shouted, “Nice bowl cut, Zeke!”

A bottle flew out of the driver’s seat window. It clouted the mailbox.

Ephraim got up.

Behind him, the hinny kicked and brayed. It was caught in the crupper, jammed on an angle. The blade wouldn’t give. The animal panicked. Ephraim attempted to calm it with gestures: easy, now … He reached for the bridle. The hinny reared. He fell back in the dirt.

A screech of rubber vaulted the cackling Redcoats south on Weavertown Pike—in between fields of corn and alfalfa, rolling around the bend, then west on Welshtown Road, still blasting that music.

Ephraim lay on his back, listening.

Above him, parallel bands of altocumulus clouds drifted over the sky. A cold front was coming. The wind had picked up. There was rain on the way. Before nightfall, probably.

Allowing his gaze to wander across the overhanging shelf of gray, Ephraim drifted slowly back to earth, dipping below the tree line. Behind him, a waterwheel gently turned, its long arm rising and falling in time, directing a steady trickle of creek water over an aqueduct, into the stables. Beyond, across the gravel drive, a chimney stack rose from a weed-choked garden, dividing the house’s white facade and three separate levels of pine-green shutters. Farther back, in the distance, the oval-shaped side of a barn, with its crumbling trim, sat flush with a wall of tall, old evergreens—after which the wreck of a windmill stood, the fence surrounding it, lined with gulls.

Ephraim sat up to wipe their gall from his brow. It was starting to burn his skin. He trudged to the creek to dunk his head.

Inside of the swirl, he listened—as one might press an ear to the railroad track—for some intimation of death to the English, whether by famine or flame, to come …

He emerged with little assurance of hope.

No, these people would only multiply. Their housing would only continue to spread. The coming years would bring legions of rental cars, neighborhood catfish carts and tour buses—and even more Amish imposter craftsmen, bakers, clerks and buggy ride drivers—stalking the roads for a glimpse of the Plain Folk in whatever context—preferably working; or riding a scooter, even better: for Ephraim, many a slow pursuit down back roads had already left him no option but barreling into the corn for cover. Those occasions would grow more frequent. So would the drive-by camera corps. And the “scenic” motels that had sprung up all over The Basin in recent, the past five, years—as the one that now bordered the Bontrager property: a ninety-yard wall of linoleum siding, with ten upper-level “observation” platforms that were built and designed for the purpose of “viewing” the local Order at work in the fields—in this case Ephraim alone, as the building had driven off most of their closest neighbors, leaving tourists to settle for the image of a solitary plow boy working his yard. Twenty-five windows per level—and often, at harvest, on weekends, filled, every one of them. Children observed him in vague confusion—as now, with the red-haired kid on the ground floor, pressing his tongue to the window, gurgling—his mother and father standing over him, training their camera’s eye on Ephraim. And worse, in an upstairs window, with little attempt at concealment and zero remorse (not to mention regard or consideration for the Ordnung’s stance on graven images): a video camera perched on a tripod, left unattended to film his whole day …

Every crop he had ever attempted to grow had been surveyed by English cameras. They felt to be bleeding him thinner each year, as they called him to account for the state of his harvest: a crop being only as good as its master, the master, only as good as his seed, and Ephraim’s tobacco, Lord have mercy, the whole rotting lot of it, sealing that verdict.

After a season of improper fertilization, drought and multiple parasites, all thirty plants had been cut in the wake of a storm, leading to massive spoilage (soon to be worsened by subsequent overexposure to sunlight to curb the wilting, then speared, too close to the butt on the lathe, then hung to smother and shed-burn high in the rafter beams of a stuffy shack) so that now, including the plow being jammed and the hinny enraged, chewing its bit, the Bontrager home could boast of a haul that would probably roll down to fifty cigars.

Disgusted, Ephraim charged the gulls. They burst and fluttered, then settled nearby. He slumped back into the dirt on his haunches. He glared at the plow, still lodged on an angle. One of its blades had been caught on a root … The rows of his plot were unworkably crooked. The soil was dry and craggy in spite of his every attempt to enrich it with dung. Even Bishop Schnaeder wouldn’t have known what to do with such mistreated land. In horror, the Bishop had already turned to the Minister, Ephraim’s father, to that end: tobacco was the absolute worst crop someone like Ephraim, alone, could hope to produce—as, for one factor: it was hardly profitable; two: it was brutally labor-intensive; and three: no one had taught the boy how to work his land. He did everything wrong. Watching the neighbors tend their fields from a distance had only crossed his signals. With the Minister off at the mill by day, and Ephraim an only, motherless child, no one was there to catch his mistakes when he made them. And so, they would only continue.

Time and again, the Bishop, and others, had appealed to Benedictus on the matter: it was wasteful, they’d argued, for his son to be working at home. He belonged in the fields at harvest.

But Minister Bontrager hadn’t conceded: the boy would remain on the property, alone. It didn’t appear to matter, at least insofar as the crops were concerned, what he did with it—just as long as he watched the house, from dawn to dusk, every day of his life.

A vehicle topped the hill, approaching. Its engine dropped. Ephraim looked up. It was one of those “pickup” trucks, that’s what they called them—an older model. Obnoxiously large. And faded red … It was slowing down. It had come to a halt. At the edge of the field, it was sitting there now. Slowly, its driver leaned forward and looked at him. Ephraim stared for a moment, annoyed. Then he waved, as though to say move on—the parking lot’s over there, you moron!

It worked. The driver, spotting the entrance ahead, moved on. And no sooner gone than a clopping of hooves from the north to replace his engine sounded, at once familiar …

Jonathan Becker rounded the wall in his topless, two-seated courting buggy. High on the box he roosted, leisurely guiding his groomed and ever-immaculate saddle-bred pacer across and over the small, meandering creek’s stone bridge—one hand on the whip-socket, empty, beside him, the other with reins in a steadied clench, and the running gear quietly gliding below, oiled from axle to perch, down the shafts—from crupper to bridle, bridle to bellyband, breeching to bit—the entire wagon.

Jonathan’s penchant for organization infuriated his supper gang members. The Crossbills, all thirteen of them, had never understood it—with Ephraim included among them. Rumspringa came only once in life. And, at twenty, Jonathan’s clock was ticking. At the most, he had three more years left to run. Now was no time, in their frame of thought, for tuning equipment or steaming trousers. Or working, for that matter, not the way he worked—or had worked, of late—as an auctioneer. Now was the 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.

“Ach!” 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 eaten their 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.

“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 into the 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 counseling session downtown—and all of the rest of it, everything Ephraim had already known at the outset, as, unlike Jon, who’d been working the auction that evening and hadn’t even gone to or stopped by the party, Ephraim had been on the roof of the barn, looking down, observing the course of events. He might have explained this, had it been feasible. He might have elaborated in detail.

But clarifying all such matters had always been next to impossible.

Ephraim was mute.

Bearing north onto Laycock Drive, they came into view of a one-room schoolhouse. Shading its tiled belfry, a pair of chestnut oaks stood over the building. A blanket of acorns covered the yard. An outhouse stood by a fence, and beyond it: a porch, with a row of scooters lined up to it.

Jonathan slowed his buggy in passing. He and Ephraim gazed toward the window. They spotted an outline of figures inside, seated at desks in the first two rows. Some of them turned at the sound of the buggy. Then Fannie appeared, if just for a moment—out from behind the instructor’s desk.

Fannie had turned eighteen that summer. This was to be her last season teaching. In less than a month (on Sunday, November 14th) she would take her vows of baptism. Shortly thereafter, as a member of the church, she would pass on her duties to Mary Brechbuhl.

She waved. Grinning, Ephraim and Jonathan waved in return.

They continued east.

A ways up the road, on Harvest Lane, Jonathan sat upright on his box. He wavered intently, sniffing the air. “Hey,” he eventually spoke up. “Do you smell something …” He paused to consider his choice of words, settling, at length, on “strange?”

Ephraim looked toward the Byars farm, at the edge of which Samson and Jeremiah were busily manning a “honey wagon,” churning a ton and a half of manure. He pointed.

Jonathan shook his head. “No, it’s more like …” He paused. “Can’t you smell that?”

Ephraim gazed ahead, unblinking. He didn’t respond. There were geese in the road.

Jonathan slowed up. “Strange,” he repeated himself, this time in English, with doubt.

Ephraim sat watching the waterfowl waddle across the pavement and down an embankment. They seemed to be spooked by the weather. They moved in a huddled rush. They were plump and healthy.

He turned around just in time to catch Jonathan casting a furtive, sidelong glance at him—one that was quickly diverted, but which still left a boldly indelible imprint of worry. Ephraim had seen that expression before. It didn’t much bother him now, or ever. Leaning back, he steadied his gaze on the road, as Intercourse loomed in the distance.

Once onto 341, it was less than a quarter of a mile to the auction lot. They pulled in, crossing a set of railroad tracks, then parked among several buggies. Jonathan tethered his steed to a post. They walked down an aisle of open-air stands—most of them piled with fabric and tools. The aromas of fodder and hay and roasting chestnuts permeated the lot. There were chickens and rabbits and goats in cages, stacked to the rear of the auction barn. A peddler trumpeted “Groundhog filets!” in Py. Dutch from behind a grill. Somebody else with a bullhorn announced a sale on lighters and nine-volt batteries—everyone haggling, everyone twisted on coffee and grease, by appearances.

Ephraim and Jonathan entered the main building, walked by the produce and butcher displays, then turned through a door to the livestock area. There, Ephraim waited impatiently, surrounded by crates of ducklings, rabbits and leghorns, as Jonathan stepped into one of the offices.

Moments later, he was back with a paycheck. “All right, then,” he announced. “I’m finished.”

Ephraim took off in a flash, winding back through the cages and out to the flea market area. Jonathan scuttled to keep up, darting through wandering packs of tourists and visitors. After a row of antique displays, they came to the record collector’s stand—and, as fortune would have it, the longhair was working. He spotted them coming and cracked a grin. “Well.” His gaze came to rest on Jonathan. “What’s up, Abe?”

“Jonathan.”

“Sorry. Whoa, you’re dressed to the nines, my man.”

Jonathan looked down—“What?”—in confusion.

The longhair laughed. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding.”

Jonathan still didn’t understand.

The longhair shifted his gaze to Ephraim, who stood in flannel and mud-stained pants, with no hat on his head and three days’ worth of stubble. Excepting his haircut, he bore little outward resemblance to an Orderly, even one in Rumspringa. The longhair looked back to Jonathan, frowning. “Well, this won’t do,” he said, shaking his head. “I can’t sell you anything dressed like that. Your people might see.” He got up and, turning, opened a door to the parking lot. “Here.”

Ephraim picked up the case marked “2 for 5” and walked out. Jonathan followed him.

Once on the dock, Ephraim got down on his knees and started to sift through the tapes. From the doorway above, the longhair remarked: “A couple of recent additions in there.”

Ephraim looked up with a glimmer of hope. He motioned one hand in a half-circle, questioning.

Puzzled, the longhair watched him, trying to make sense of it.

Jonathan ventured a guess. “He’s talking about last week, I think.”

The longhair’s expression brightened suddenly. “Ah! You dug that Possum. Is that it?”

Ephraim appeared confused, if hopeful.

Grinning, the longhair went on to explain: “That’s what they call George Jones, his moniker.”

Ephraim nodded emphatically yes.

“No,” said the longhair. “Sorry ’bout that. But I’ll keep my eyes open. Try me next week.”

Satisfied, at least insofar as the longhair identified, Ephraim nodded his head. Between them, a torch had been passed, an exclusive understanding sallied forth.

He returned to the bargain box, much relieved. He sifted and picked with a gratified air. One of the tape covers featured a group of (women?) in war paint stalking a scrap yard. Another showed figures with plastic geranium pots on their heads, entitled: Devo. Continuing, someone who looked like the Minister Bontrager lost on a drunk: Aqualung. Finally, a creature named Ponharev leaned on a wall with his barn door flap hanging open.

“Forget that, kid,” said the longhair. “You want something wicked? Try this.” He brandished a tape.

Turning it over, Ephraim regarded the cover design. Very little was clear: a wash of darkness streaked with burgundy red and what looked to be creases of light. On closer examination, a host of misshapen figures began to emerge. In the center, strapped to a chair: the head of a goat on the shoulders and chest of a man. Beside it, a body, inverted, possibly hung by a hook from the roof of a cave. To its left, a five-pointed figure entangled in hieroglyphics. And down below, a lake of crimson bobbing with limbs and appendages, reading: “REIGN IN BLOOD.”

Ephraim looked up to the longhair, as though to ask, This is good?

“That,” said the longhair, grinning with relish “is wicked shit.”

Outside, the crowd was steadily thinning. The clouds hung heavy now. Rain was imminent. Jonathan’s pacer, tied to the hitching post, shifted restlessly, stamping the gravel.

Time was short. They would need to return via 341 at a steady clip.

Ephraim climbed into the buggy ahead of Jonathan, fixed on manning the pacer. Always the more assertive driver, he gripped the reins and parried about. Within moments, the railroad tracks had passed under them. Turning west, they rolled through a stoplight, moving by quilt and basketry outlets—then under a bridge and onto an overpass, into the thick of a traffic jam …

At once, it was clear they had made a mistake. And terribly, irreversibly so—there was no way to angle the buggy around with a full lane of steadily oncoming traffic. Their own lane, devoid of an adequate shoulder, was backed up for three hundred yards from the Sprawl Mart—a ten-acre superstore complex—ahead: one week away from its grand opening, and still, after fourteen months in construction, mobbed with resident protesters, area farmers and small local business owners.

Ephraim and Jonathan hadn’t foreseen this delay. For them, as with most of the Plain Folk who normally veered from this road on principle, the Sprawl Mart was just another English atrocity. In appearance, it wasn’t much worse than the rest. They certainly hadn’t expected the roads to be tied up this badly in both directions.

An oncoming tour bus gradually slowed to a crawl on approaching Jonathan’s buggy. Ephraim looked up to see wall-eyed Redcoats staring down on them, angling cameras. One of them slammed his head to the tinted window in mute incapacitation. The others didn’t really appear to know what they needed or wanted to say, they just stared. The driver’s voice came over the intercom: “Don’t worry, folks, these people are guaranteed nonviolent. Just try to remember: the camera steals their souls.” (Laughter.) “So, if you must, try and shoot on the sly …”

Flashbulbs exploded. Ephraim winced.

Behind the bus, a line of drivers began to honk and rev their engines. The bus driver paid them no mind. Ephraim looked up, blinking away the static. He singled out one of the cameras and pointed. The Redcoat blinked, apparently startled. Ephraim threw him a middle finger. Jonathan gasped. The bus driver took off.

Slowly, their lane began to move. But it didn’t proceed more than twenty yards—they had just drifted into view of the road crew—when everything slowed to a halt once more. A traffic director had flipped his sign from SLOW to STOP. The delay would continue. Three more lanes of traffic would now be allowed to pass, one at a time, before the next chance to get through came around, and even then, there was no guarantee …

Ephraim, losing patience quickly, hopped out of the buggy and scouted ahead. He passed a line of motionless vehicles. Most of their drivers regarded him warily. Scowling, he batted the hood of a station wagon at random, then turned around.

He climbed back into the buggy. His body felt overheated. He clawed at his forearms … Something was wrong: out of nowhere, it seemed, he was terribly thirsty. His throat was burning.

Ahead, in the distance, a tractor-trailer was angling out of the superstore lot. It swung around to the west at a drag. Ephraim spotted it slowly approaching.

He whirled on Jonathan, agitated, motioning: Where’s the stereo? Jonathan glanced over one of his shoulders, into the trunk. Ephraim followed his gesture and, presently, pulled up the battery-powered player. Then he inserted the Wicked Shet tape.

At first, once the leader had rolled and the opening notes had begun, booming out of the speakers, Ephraim was forced to assume there was something wrong with the tape. This equipment had never emitted such grating, cacophonic belches. It sounded like a chain saw, whining and rising in sharp, sporadic bursts, then leveling … Adding to matters, the longhair had sold them faulty goods. Or so it seemed—till the bashing commenced: like a trash can lid being whacked with a crowbar—ONE, overtop of the chain saw, then—ONE, TWO—more menacing now, more deliberate—ONE—as a serpent coiled to strike—ONE, TWO—the strike giving way to a gallop: the pound of a broken fan belt slapping the underside of an engine hood: approaching, over the fields, preparing to sack and pillage and raze and defile—ONE, TWO—with the chain saws winding, the crowbar, the fan belt, pushing to a head, then: “AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHHHHH”—a scream, like ten thousand demons plummeting hell-bound, end over end …

Ephraim’s equilibrium reeled. He fell forward, bracing his weight on the dash.

A series of turbulent images flared in relief on the screen of his inner eye. He watched them tumble and weave and recede into blackening madness.

Then came the vocals:

Slow Death

Immense Decay

Showers that cleanse you of your life

Forced in

Like cattle you run

Stripped of your life’s worth

Human mice for the Angel of Death

Back to the galloping, chain saws, crowbars, visions of torture beyond comprehension:

Angel of Death

Monarch to the kingdom of the dead …

Beside him, Jonathan reached for the stereo, desperately trying to silence the roar.

But Ephraim, in white-knuckled rapture, blocked his attempt with a sweep of one leg and then went on, much to the shock of surrounding motorists (if equally geared to the protesters’ cheering) to tighten the reins, angle the buggy out into the oncoming lane and charge.

Jonathan nearly flew off his box.

A bystander shouted. “Get out of the way!”

Gripping the reins even tighter, Ephraim lashed the pacer’s haunches, lunging. Above the wind and the pounding of hooves and the carriage wheels grating on asphalt beneath him, the Wicked Shet blasted.

Surgery with no anesthesia

Feel the knife pierce you intensely

Inferior, no use to mankind

Strapped down screaming out to die …

Angel of Death

Monarch to the kingdom of the dead

Infamous butcher

Angel of Death …

Jonathan cried out. The protesters screamed as the oncoming trailer blared its horn. The rest of the traffic joined in with it, over which Ephraim, holding steady, howled.