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They lived some distance away from the established community, so there was time for many more quips and heehaws. Affable, relaxed in his manhood, Harvey raised important questions for geneticists: how could someone with his dad’s personal and physical traits have sired him?

If her husband was large and ample of girth, Gertie was petite and angular in shape. Even her face was small, with sharp features. But when she opened her mouth to laugh, she was as raucous as her husband.

The two of them were goofy and proud of it. No subject of conversation was too madcap. After inquiring about my family back home, they zeroed in on the fact that I had changed my younger siblings’ diapers.

“I do that too,” Harvey said.

“Right now, with him?” I asked, indicating the blond child sleeping blissfully in Gertie’s arms, like some baby sun-god of the north.

“Yes.” Then he added, “But if it’s the messy kind, I give it to her.” He motioned Gertie’s way, and she giggled.

“You must have to clean up worse messes than that! Don’t you have some pigs or cattle?”

“Yes, but human is worse—to me.”

We finally came in sight of a small white bungalow centered on about forty fecund acres. The house was almost indistinguishable in size and appearance from the one I was renting from Mr. Miller. Would all the Miller offspring begin their marriages in the same adorable starter cottages? Inside there were differences: the kitchen was in front and the bedroom in back. The walls were painted white, not paneled in dark wood.

Harvey and I settled into our chairs at the table while Gertie began laying out dishes and utensils. “We want you to be able to say you got enough,” she said. I noticed some nervousness in her voice. In a few minutes she had set before us bowls of homemade cottage cheese, cabbage and carrot soup, chili beans and meat, diced potatoes, sweet pickles, okra pickles, pickled corn, and fresh-baked bread and butter with a jar of homegrown sorghum molasses. I took a bit of everything except the okra pickles, pickled corn, and molasses. It wasn’t that I didn’t care for these; I just ran out of room on my plate.

Partway through the meal Gertie went to the counter and returned with a serving dish of diced cucumbers, which she placed in front of me. She looked at her husband and turned up her nose. “You don’t like raw cucumbers.”

“I don’t ask for them!” he squawked genially.

She seemed to be tweaking him, perhaps because of his obvious preference for heavier foods. He was on his third slice of her homemade bread, with home-churned butter and homemade elderberry jam on top. “I don’t like boughten bread,” he chortled. “Why, I wouldn’t even eat bread if it was boughten.” And he kept heaping the beans and more bread onto his plate. Compared to the other Minimites, he admitted, the two of them did eat noticeably more. “But the best way to lose weight is to work hard!” he asserted.

“I don’t know!” squealed Gertie, “Your pants are sometimes pretty tight!”

Church was a penance for Harvey, he confessed, because it meant he had to go four straight hours without eating. He could not make it through the service without severe hunger pains. “It takes seven days to feed me for six days of work,” he said. “How about you? Getting to like farming?”

“Pretty well. Gives you a little of everything, including being part of the family. I like not being completely separated from my wife. That’s probably why my parents divorced. Of course that’s not all the reason.”

“But it’s a start,” said Harvey.

“I like having Harvey around,” added Gertie affectionately. “And he knows it.” Then she arched her eyebrows. “Otherwise I wouldn’t know what he was doing.”

Harvey grabbed his son from the high chair and began cuddling him unabashedly. The tiny boy, in turn, rejoiced in the attention. Harvey threw him up and down on his lap and nuzzled him with his beard. I was won over by the exhibitionism of it.

The boy, Joshua, had started walking two weeks earlier but had regressed