Blind Man's Lantern Part 2

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-s.h.i.+elded 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 waving their arms as they called companions to view the black-bearded stranger.

Aaron whoaed his horse and took a handful of _anenes_, copper tenth-penny bits, to rattle between his hands. "_Zonang!_" he shouted: "Come here! Is there a boy amongst you brave enough to ride with an off-worlder to the Sarki's house, pointing him the way?"

One of the boys laughed at Aaron's slow, careful Hausa. "Let Black-Hat's whiskers point him the way!" the boy yelled.

"_Uwaka! Ubaka!_" d.a.m.ning both parents of the rude one, another youngster trotted up to Aaron's wagon and raised a skinny brown fist in greeting. "Sir Off-Worlder, I who am named Waziri, Musa-the-Carpenter's son, would be honored to direct you to the house of Sarki Kazunzumi."

"The honor, young man, is mine," Stoltzfoos a.s.sured the lad, raising his own fist gravely. "My name is Haruna, son of Levi," he said, reaching down to hoist the boy up beside him on the wagon's seat. "Your friends have ill manners." He giddapped the horse.

"Buzzard-heads!" Waziri shouted back at his whilom companions.

"Peace, Waziri!" Aaron protested. "You'll frighten my poor horse into conniptions. Do you work for your father, the carpenter?"

"_To_, honorable Haruna," the boy said. "Yes." The empty wagon thumped over the wheel-cut streets like a wooden drum. "By the Mother, sir, I have great knowledge of planing and joining; of all the various sorts of wood, and the curing of them; all the tools my father uses are as familiar to me as my own left hand."

"Carpentry is a skillful trade," Aaron said. "Myself, I am but a farmer."

"By Mother's light! So am I!" Waziri said, dazzled by this coincidence.

"I can cultivate a field free of all its noxious weeds and touch never a food-plant. I can steer a plow straight as a snapped chalk-string, grade seed with a sure eye; I can spread manure--"

"I'm sure you can, Waziri," Aaron said. "I need a man of just those rare qualifications to work for me. Know you such a paragon?"

"Mother's name! Myself, your Honor!"

Aaron Stoltzfoos shook the hand of his hired man, an alien convention that much impressed Waziri. The boy was to draw three hundred anenes a day, some thirty-five cents, well above the local minimum-wage conventions; and he would get his bed and meals. Aaron's confidence that the boastful lad would make a farmer was bolstered by Waziri's loud calculations: "Three hundred coppers a day make, in ten day's work, a bronze cowrie; ten big bronzes make a silver cowrie, the price of an acre of land. Haruna, will you teach me your off-world farming? Will you allow me to buy land that neighbors yours?"

"_Sei schtill, Buu_," Aaron said, laughing. "Before you reap your first crop, you must find me the Sarki."

"We are here, Master Haruna."

The Sarki's house was no larger than its neighbors, Moorish-styled and domed-roofed like the others; but it wore on its streetside walls designs cut into the stucco, scrolls and arabesques. Just above the doorway, which opened spang onto the broadway of Datura, a grinning face peered down upon the visitors, its eyes ruby-colored gla.s.s.

Waziri pounded the door for Aaron, and stepped aside to let his new employer do the speaking. They were admitted to the house by a thin, old man wearing a pink turban. As they followed this butler down a hallway, Aaron and Waziri heard the shrieks and giggles of feminine consternation that told of women being herded into the zenana. The Amishman glimpsed one of the ladies, perhaps Sarki Kazunzumi's most junior wife, das.h.i.+ng toward the female sanctuary. Her eyes were lozenges of antimony; her hands, dipped in henna, seemed clad in pale kid gloves. Aaron, recalling pointers on Murnan etiquette he'd received at Georgetown, elaborately did not see the lady. He removed his hat as the turbaned butler bowed him to a plush-covered sofa. Waziri was cuffed to a mat beside the door.

"_Rankes.h.i.+ dade!_" the Sarki said. "May the Mother bring you the light of understanding."

"Light and long life, O Sarki," Stoltzfoos said, standing up.

"Will the guest who honors my roof-cup taste coffee with his fortunate host?" the Sarki asked.

"The lucky guest will be ever the Sarki's servant if your Honor allows him to share his pleasure with his fellow-farmer and employee, Waziri the son of Musa," Aaron said.

"You'd better have hired mice to guard your stored grain, O Haruna; and blowflies to curry your cattle, than to have engaged the son of Musa as a farmer," Kazunzumi growled. "Waziri has little light of understanding.

He will try to win from the soil what only honest sweat and Mother's grace can cause to grow. This boy will gray your beard, Haruna."

"Perhaps the sun that warms the soil will light his brains to understanding," Aaron suggested.

"Better that your hand should leave the plowhandle from time to time to warm his lazy fundament," the Sarki said.

"Just so, O Sarki," the Amishman said. "If Waziri does not serve me well, I have an enormous boar who will, if kept long enough from wholesomer food, rid me of a lazy farm-hand." Waziri grinned at all the attention he was getting from the two most important men in town, and sat expectantly as the turbaned elder brought in coffee.

Stoltzfoos watched the Sarki, and aped his actions. Water was served with the coffee; this was to rinse the mouth that the beverage could be tasted with fresh taste buds. The coffee was brown as floodwater silt, heavy with sugar, and very hot; and the cups had no handles. "You are the first European I have seen for many years, friend Haruna," the Sarki said. "It is five years gone that the white off-worlders came, and with a black man as their voice purchased with silver the land you now farm."

"They bought well," Aaron said; "the seller sold justly. When the fist of winter loosens, the soil will prove as rich as b.u.t.ter."

"When the first green breaks through, and you may break the soil without offense, you will do well," Kazunzumi said. "You are a man who loves the land."

"My fathers have flourished with the soil for twenty generations," the Amishman said. "I pray another twenty may live to inherit my good fortune."

"Haruna," the Sarki said, "I see that you are a man of the book, that volume of which Mother in her grace turns over a fresh page each spring.

Though your skin is as pale as the flesh of my palm, though you have but one wife, though you speak throat-deep and strangely, yet you and I are more alike than different. The Mother has given you light, Haruna, her greatest gift."

"I thank the Sarki for his words," Aaron said. "Sir, my good and only wife--I am a poor man, and bound by another law than that of the fortunate Kazunzumi--adds her thanks to mine for the rich gifts the Chief of Datura presented us, his servants. In simple thanks, I have some poor things to tender our benefactor."

Waziri, perceiving the tenor of Aaron's talk, sprang to his feet and hastened out to the wagon for the bundles he'd seen under the seat. He returned, staggering under a seventy-pound bale of long-leaf tobacco, product of Aaron's father's farm. He went back for a bolt of scarlet silk for the Sarki's paramount wife, and strings of candy for the great man's children. He puffed in with one last brown-wrapped parcel, which he unpacked to display a leather saddle. This confection was embossed with a hundred intricate designs, rich with silver; un-Amish as a Christmas tree. Judging from the Sarki's dazzled thanks, the saddle was just the thing for a Murnan Chief.

As soon as Kazunzumi had delivered his pyrotechnic speech of thanks, and had directed that Aaron's gifts be placed on a velvet-draped dais at the end of the room, a roast kid was brought in. Waziri, half drunk with the elegance of it all, fell to like any other adolescent boy, and was soon grease to the armpits. Aaron, more careful, referred his actions to the Sarki's. The bread must be broken, not cut; and it was eaten with the right hand only, the left lying in the lap as though broken. Belching seemed to be _de rigueur_ as a tribute to the cuisine, so Aaron belched his stomach flat.

Business could now be discussed. Aaron, having no pencil, traced with a greasy finger on the tile floor the outlines of the barn and farmhouse he envisaged. The Sarki from time to time demanded of young Waziri such facts as a carpenter's son might be expected to know, and added lumber-prices in his head as Aaron's bank-barn and two-story farmhouse took form in his imagination. Finally he told the Amishman what the two buildings would cost. Better pleased by this figure than he'd expected to be, Aaron initiated the long-drawn ceremony required to discharge himself from Kazunzumi's hospitality.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

As the Stoltzfoos wagon jolted out the gate of Datura, bearing the cot and clothes trunk of Waziri together with the owner of those chattels, the boys who'd jeered before now stared with respect. The black-hatted _Turawa_ had been to visit the Sarki; this established him as no safe man to mock. Waziri gave his late playmates no notice beyond sitting rather straighter on the wagon seat than was comfortable.

There was light enough left when they got back to the farm for Aaron and Waziri to pace out the dimensions of the barn and house. The bank-barn would go up first, of course. No Christian owner of beasts could consent to being well-housed while his animals steamed and s.h.i.+vered in a cloth-sided tent. Waziri pounded stakes into the frozen ground to mark the corners of the barn. Aaron pointed out the drainage-line that would have to be ditched, and explained how the removed earth would be packed, with the clay dug for the cellar, into a ramp leading to the barn's second story in the back. Come next fall, the hayladder could be pulled right up that driveway to be unloaded above the stalls. Aaron took the boy to the frozen-solid creek to show him where a wheel could be placed to lift water to a spillway for the upper fields. He introduced his new helper to Wutzchen, and was pleased to hear Waziri speak wistfully of pork chops. Waziri didn't want to meet Martha yet, though. As a proper Murnan boy, he was not eager to be introduced to the boss' barefaced wife, though she bribed him with a fat wedge of applecake.

When Waziri set out with the lantern to tend to the final outdoor ch.o.r.es, Aaron inquired of his wife's day. The Sarki's Paramount Wife, with two servants, had indeed visited, bringing more gifts of food and clothing. Somehow the four of them had managed to breach the Hausa-_Pennsylfawnisch Deitsch_ curtain. "What in the world did you talk about?" Aaron asked.

"First, not knowing what to say, I showed the ladies a drop of vinegar under the microscope," Martha said. "They screamed when they saw all the wriggly worms, and I was put to it to keep them from bundling back home.

Then we talked about you, Stoltz, and about the farm; and when would I be giving you _Kinner_ to help with all the work," she said. Martha fiddled with the cloak she was sewing for her husband. "It was largely their heathen speech we used, so I understood only what they pointed at; but they ate hearty of anything without vinegar in it, and I laughed with them like with friends at a quilting-bee. My, Stoltz! Those _Nay-yer_ women are lovely, all jeweled like queens, even the servant girls; even though they have no proper understanding of Christian behavior."

"Did they make you feel welcome, then?" Aaron asked.

"_Ach, ja!_ They pitied me, I thought," Martha said. "They said you must be poor, to have but one wife to comfort you; but they said that if the crops be good, you can earn a second woman by next winter. _Chuudes Paste!_"

"I hope you told the Sarki's woman we've been married only since haying-time," Aaron said, "and it's a bit previous for you to be giving me little farmhands."

"I did that," Martha said. "I told them, too, that by the time the oak leaves are the size of squirrel's ears--if this place has oaks, indeed, or squirrels--we'd have a youngling squalling in our house, loud as any of the Sarki's."

Waziri, crouched near the tent to pick up such talk as might pa.s.s inside concerning himself, was at first dismayed by Aaron's whoops 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 b.u.t.termilk-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 tr.i.m.m.i.n.g one's beard a bit, for example, to keep it out of one's soup; or plucking a guitar to raise the spirits.