Two for the Price of One

 It is two weeks before the summer solstice, and the first cutting of hay lies like a blanket on the fields. The farm which Vernon inherited from his father is wrapped in the aroma of green. The schoolyard romance with Anna Thorne has been subsisting the last six years on a steady diet of daily visits to the house on Town Hall Road where she and the other young women live. Anna, aged 23, has remained unmarried later than most in the community.

After the Nocturn, the Mennonites organized themselves into choirs. The single women's choir, the single men's choir and the family choir. In all the years Anna has lived in the young women's household she has seen nearly every girl in town arrive, fall in love, get married and move out. The crop of young women has turned over three times during her tenure. They've come to refer to her as the house grandmother.

But Anna Thorne is a patient woman and Vernon is a deliberate man; and the path of least resistance will always be the most comfortable one to amble along. And so, it is the tremendous force of the wayfarers that summer that provides the needed jolt. It pushes Vernon off the road of indecision and into marriage. But not to Anna Thorne.

The Lingenfelter farm is the furthest out, just on the edge of town. Out where County Road J meets Old Highway 17. Most of the old-world highways have disappeared. Ice and snow, rain and heat and plant life rising up from the earth has digested the roads. The earth has an insatiable appetite for manmade things. Still, there are wide grassy boulevards where blacktop or concreate once crisscrossed the landscape. Echoes of the past. Now they are green thoroughfares running straight and true, flanked by trees. And ten miles outside of town, vines have curled their way up the few decrepit telephone poles still standing and strung themselves like old world Christmas lights along Highway 51.

Herman Lingenfelter is unhitching his horses from the hay press when he sees them. Thirty or more wayfarers, traveling along the grassy strip on foot and horseback, toting a flatbed wagon of supplies. They creep down the road like a lazy parade, marching past an open field of ancient earth-movers that stand like dinosaurs. Flecks of yellow peek through the rust-colored shroud of time, fossils of another age. Herman stands dumbfounded, mouth ajar. One of the men looks up at him as they pass, then back to the road. The company press on toward the center of town and Herman's head moves like a weathervane, following the procession.

Anna Thorne is taking careful inventory of the pickled vegetables in the community storehouse. Very little is left from the old world by way of glass jars. This is before Sheldon Schmidt took up glass blowing. Vegetables are stored in all manner of pots, barrels, flasks and in tin or ceramic jars. Each a different size and shape. The math required to measure the volume in each container is gorgeous, and Anna is lost in the beauty of her calculations when the church bell beckons. It is ringing to call the community together, either in welcome or in defense, as the wayfarers halt in front of the Town Hall.

The Mennonites are cautious people, huddled in a dozen groups of whisperers in front of the few buildings that make up Gleason. There has not been a raid in years, but the nightmare of their recollection hangs on them like humidity. The few Mennonites who lived through the Nocturn nurse even more troubling memories.

Bishop Weber and the nineteen-year-old leader of the young men's household, Elder Stoltz, approach the strangers. Elder Stoltz is not much of an elder, his parents named him Elder hoping it might afford him some respect. Since becoming leader of the young men's household people refer to him as Elder as if it is his title. His high cheekbones are red from the hay harvest, but they would have been so even without the field work. The women in the party of visitors are practically naked, or so it seems to him. Elder Stoltz and Bishop Weber do their best to avert their eyes and focus on the red-haired man who dismounts and is walking toward them. The man cannot be much older than Elder Stolz, but his face is creased with many more worries.