Pennsylvania

Chapter 1 Old Pennsylvania

“Explain it to me again, brother. How do you get from here to there?”

Jed pushed his forehead into Zoe’s flank to make certain that she didn’t kick. She didn’t do it often, but she’d nailed him before and he wasn’t anxious for a repeat of that performance. He exhaled in mock annoyance at his little brother’s questions, but the truth was that he loved talking about the journey. He just pretended to hate it. Talking about it made it seem more real, but somehow less imminent in a way that he wasn’t sure he understood completely. He’d explained the whole pilgrimage and the colonization process to Amos a hundred times, at least, but Amos wasn’t going to stop talking about it until his older brother was gone.

“An airbus picks me up there,” he pointed up the long, winding drive, “and we fly to the Columbia checkpoint. From there, I board an English airbus that takes me to the Speedwell Galactic Transport station out in the desert in far West Texas. From there, all the pilgrims will board a ship bound for New Pennsylvania.”

“You’re really going, Jed?”

“I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t. I’ve already paid for my ticket, all except the monitoring. Nothing has happened that would change my mind, so I’m going.”

Jed finished stripping out the final teat, and the last squirts of milk buzzed into the bucket, which was now almost overflowing. “Our people have been pioneering for a thousand years or more. When our ancestors came here to Pennsylvania, they came on fearsome and incredible ships, traveling in ways that were strange to them at the time.”

“I felt sure you’d change your mind; just sure of it,” Amos said.

Amos was fourteen, fully four years younger, spry and witty, and he was not old enough yet to go through the initiation and orientation process that was administered to anyone interested in pioneering in New Pennsylvania.

Jed finished wiping down Zoe’s udder with warm water mixed with a light and mild soap, and then he stood, hanging the milking stool on the post with practiced dexterity.

“Once we get on our way…” He paused. This was the hard part to explain. “You see, Amos, New Pennsylvania is very, very far away—outside of our galaxy—in a place with another sun altogether. Anyway, once we board the ship, the passengers go to sleep in these things called ‘pods,’ and, according to the paperwork, we’ll sleep for nine full years. But—and this is the tricky thing—when we wake up, we won’t have aged any at all.”

Amos had heard this explanation from his older brother many times before, but he still whistled at the thought.

“And it will be that nine years will have passed according to the ship’s time. But all in all, to the passenger, it will feel like a journey of just a few hours!”

“I don’t understand it, Jed,” Amos said, screwing up his mouth and shaking his head. “I don’t know why the elders have approved of it.”

“What else can we do, little brother? Where can we go? We’re running out of land here, and no one can afford to buy any more. The government is pushing us out. It’s always been this way. The elders approved of this migration for the same reasons that many centuries ago they approved of our migration from Europe to here. Without it, we’ll be erased as a people. It’s already happening, Amos. Almost everyone we know works in town in the factories. Our population is exploding, and our way of life is dying out. But this isn’t the first time this has happened.”

“No?”

“No. It’s happened many times way far back in history, but it happened during Grandfather’s time too, when the wars came, and the population of the English dwindled, and after that, we had room to spread out more.”

Amos shrugged and his shoulders dropped. “Right. And this time, there is nowhere to go. But why must you go all the way to another planet? And why must Mother and Father never hear from you ever again?”

“When our people left Germany, Holland, and France to come to Pennsylvania, do you think they kept in touch with the old places after that? They didn’t rush home for weddings or funerals, Amos. It was too far away, and the travel was too expensive and too dangerous. There were no phones, and letters were expensive. Our people were never much for those forms of communication anyway.”

Jed looked at his brother and slapped him on the back. “Once I leave for New Pennsylvania, I’ll be in a place where it’s impossible to communicate back to here. The ships that take us there, they never come back. It’s a one-way voyage because those machines travel millions and millions of miles while we just sleep away there in the pods.” Jed looked at his brother and smiled. “Don’t be sad, little brother. It will only be a few years before you can come too. In fact, if the Lord wills it, when you start on your own journey, you’ll already be on your way by rocket ship before I even get there! Hopefully I’ll have a place set up for us by the time you arrive, and we’ll work the farm together.”

Amos shuffled his feet, his eyes down and his voice lowered, almost in a mumble. “Why can’t Mother and Father join us? Why don’t we all—everyone in the community—travel together at the same time?”

While they talked, Jed poured the milk into a stainless-steel vat, closed the lid, then unhooked Zoe from the tether that kept her in the milking stall. He backed her out and then walked with her out of the barn and into the southwest paddock. Amos followed with his hands thrust deeply into the pockets of his black broadfall pants.

“You know the answers to those questions, Amos. They want young people. Eighteen to twenty-five only. They need people to work the land, and the pioneers who go will need every advantage they can get. It’s going to be tough starting out. The new colony cannot yet afford to take care of the elderly and the infirm. Besides, Mother and Father don’t want to go. This has always been their home, and though they support us going when it’s our time, they agree with the elders: only those who are needed should go.”

Jed unhooked the lead from Zoe’s halter and she walked only a few steps away before she started grazing on the lush grass. He folded up her lead and stuck it in his front pocket, and as he continued trying to soothe and placate his troubled brother, the two walked across the paddock.

“Eighteen to twenty-five is the perfect age, anyway. The younger children can work the farms here, and those who emigrate are the ones who would be just starting to look for their own land and new farms. Well, there aren’t many farms to find any more, so pioneering is the new thing. But it’s not new. Like I said before, our people have been doing it since the beginning. There’s nothing really new in this at all.”

Amos looked up as he followed his brother to the pump near the paddock fence. Jed pumped the handle, and when the cool, clear water came bursting forth, Amos scrubbed the milk pail under it until it was spotless. The grass grew thick and lush around their feet, and the water that splashed over it formed into glassy droplets on the blades and made the grass glisten.

“What if something bad happens to the ship along the way? What if it crashes or you die?”

“What if we were both struck by lightning right here in this field? Everyone dies, Amos. Zoe might’ve kicked either one of us in the head just now, and it would be over—just like that.” He snapped his fingers.

“Well, I think taking a spaceship to another galaxy is a little more dangerous than milking Zoe, brother.”

“Maybe, but we wouldn’t be here milking Zoe if our ancestors hadn’t braved the voyage to a new world. They came to escape religious bigotry and persecution, and to find new lands to farm. That’s the same reason I’m going to New Pennsylvania.”

“Are you all ready to go?”

“I am. They don’t let you take much, so I don’t have to pack. Basically you get there with what you’re wearing and not much more. They expect me to buy everything new when I arrive. That’s why I’ve been saving money.”

“And you won’t change your mind?”

“I will not.”

“Okay, brother. Then I’ll come after you. Four more years and I’ll be old enough. Besides, I’d like to see Matthias again. It’s been a year since he emigrated. It’s funny to think that he’s been gone a year and he’s not even there yet. It’ll be nice to see him again.”

Jed smiled and popped his brother’s hat up, then pushed it back down on his head. “Well, we’d better go eat. The airbus will be here in an hour.”

* * *

It was hard to say goodbye to his mother and father. They both masked their emotions as much as they could and smiled a lot, but he knew his mother wanted to cry because her eyes were damp and sparkled when the light hit them just right. Abraham Troyer, his father, shook his hand firmly, and then they all prayed together before Jed walked up the long drive to where the airbus would pick him up.

As he walked up, he thought about the journey, and what might lie before him. Jed couldn’t help but think about the Plain People who had first come to America to farm and tame the wilds of this Pennsylvania. When he reached the last bend in the drive, he turned slowly to look back at the farm, and his boots crunched the gravel as he rotated. A soft spring gust blew up through the paddock and past the split-rail fence, and it jostled the felt brim of his hat. The breeze carried the fragrance of foxglove and touch-me-not growing wild just outside the fence of the paddock, and the mingled scents—of the wildflowers, of soil, of horse manure and moist grass—framed for his memory the smell of home.

He froze for a moment when he saw the barn. That beautiful old barn. It had been the center of his life for most of his eighteen years. It was made of heavy stone two-thirds of the way up its height and then solid beams the rest of the way. The barn was more than two centuries old, and Jed knew that unless something bad happened to it, it would be standing there two hundred years hence. This Amish barn was constructed back when people built things with the future in mind. Back when people—even the English—thought about the generations to come, and built with the intention of blessing them. There was permanence to the Troyers’ old barn. In Jed’s mind it stood like a covenant between the ancestors and their progeny. In its Old World style it declared to the temporary society and impermanent culture around it that there had once been another way to live. Strangers in buses liked to tour these country roads just to see the old farms and barns and the Plain People going about their work in the fields. This old barn was definitely a favorite for the tourists due to its classical Amish design, but the structure did have one blemish.

He saw it up there near the top, on the window in the gabled end. The bottom-right pane of glass that wasn’t there. Jed had broken it accidentally with his slingshot four years ago. He’d been about Amos’s age when it happened, and his father had ordered him to “fix it.” So he’d fixed it, all right. What did a fourteen-year-old child know about fixing a window?

He’d found a coffee can—red with white printing, the old-timey kind—and had cut the can until he could stomp it flat. Measuring it out perfectly, he’d carefully snipped the can with metal shears until it fit where the glass pane had been; and now, there it was still, four years later. He’d expected his father to complain about it and to order a new pane of glass for the window, but for some reason the old patriarch thought that the whole thing was terribly funny. He laughed every time he looked up and saw it. He’d slap Jed on the shoulder and say, “Well, boy, your coffee can is staring down on us!”

He turned to finish his walk to the airbus stop. Maybe that coffee-can windowpane is part of the covenant too, he thought. Maybe in a hundred years, that coffee can will still be staring down from the height of the barn as a way of telling the world that it can change all it wants to, but, down deep, the people who live in this place will never change.