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By Root 764 0

space with Nannie and a handful of other farmers from the upper end of the county. The only rule was that everything had to be organic. The Amish didn’t use any poisons, which seemed all right to Garnett if it was a religious matter. But Nannie’s presence among them had settled it: he couldn’t set foot in the place once she became a part of it, for now it was Organic, capital O, with its placid, irritating sense of holier-than-thou. So! No more stopping by on Saturday mornings to buy a delicious fresh pie and stand among these innocent youngsters with their neat stacks of vegetables, preserves, and rabbits. He missed them, he realized sadly, recognizing the same small ache that came when he thought of his boy’s face in innocent childhood—his own son barefoot with a fishing pole, the terrible mistakes all lying ahead of him still. Garnett missed hearing the Amish children count out his change in an accent that seemed vaguely foreign while he covertly looked at their feet, which were thickly callused, for they wore no shoes all summer long. He knew the Amish didn’t send their children to school, and technically he disapproved of what they called godly simplicity (actually simple backwardness). Yet he had a soft spot for those boys and girls. He wondered why the adults sent the children to town to do their selling. Were the adults elsewhere in town on other business, making the small, spare purchases they must surely need to make? (A rake, some kerosene, something like that, he imagined.) Did they feel the children would make better emissaries for representing their kind? Was it a play for sympathy? It seemed to run against their habit of isolation, Garnett thought. Letting these children come into town to watch other families pile out of station wagons, to see other children play with radios or the electronic thingamajigs they all carried in their pockets now while their mothers idly handled the melons—what were those Amish children learning to want, that they could never have?

Half a block up from the market he slowed and pulled his truck into a parking spot on the side of the street. He sat for a while, considering his alternatives. He could go and buy a pie. They had the most wonderful pies. Apple, cherry, and something they called shoofly. But where in heaven’s name was Nannie Rawley? Her truck was there, and in front of it was a table with her kinds of things, the frills she’d gotten into when apples were out of season: lemon basil, lavender sachets, dried flowers—the sorts of things he considered so unnecessary that it embarrassed him to look at them. Where was she?

He would walk down to the end of the block and do his errands at Little Brothers’, he decided. On the walk back, if the coast was clear, he would buy a pie. He would try to find one particular boy he remembered, with the stiff Dutch-boy haircut and the rabbits in a cage. He’d chatted with that young fellow and given him some advice about poultry. Ezra, that boy was. Or Ezekiel? Garnett mounted the concrete steps to Little Brothers’ with a light and steady heart, but things did not go well from that point on. Right on the threshold where Dink Little greeted him by name, he realized he’d forgotten his list. He patted his shirt pocket, ready to whip it out with a flourish in answer to Dink’s predictable “What’ challneed deday?” Then he patted his other pocket. But he’d changed his shirt, of course.

“I just need to look around a minute, Dink,” Garnett replied, feeling sure he could quickly reconstruct his list as soon as he saw one of the items on the shelf. But he saw nothing he needed here. The musty, high-ceilinged store suddenly seemed more like an attic than a place of commerce: tall stacks of galvanized buckets leaned this way and that, mops leaned lazily against shelves full of floor polish. Stacks of green work gloves reached out toward him like a host of dismembered hands. He staggered sideways around a display of lawn mowers on sale and bumped his head on the sign above them that was so large and colorful it gave him a headache even without his reading