Strelnikov
4th Level Red Feather
- Joined
- May 7, 2001
- Messages
- 1,812
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By Strelnikov
Copyright 2005 by the author
Author’s Note: This story turned into a novella, 30+ pages of 10-point type, because I couldn’t tell it in anything shorter. It’s closely related to “Dani Deaver” and my other stories set at Commonwealth University. It’s also closely related to another – you’ll know which when you get there. Hope you enjoy it – as always, feedback is encouraged and welcome.
Alicia Jemison laid her book aside, stood up and stretched. Should have found something else to read, she grumbled to herself. She liked David Weber’s science-fiction novels about Honor Harrington, a female Horatio Hornblower of the far future, but three of them back-to-back was a bit much. Still, there wasn’t much else to do in a college town on a summer Thursday afternoon.
Alicia was 19 – she would be a Sophomore at Commonwealth University this fall. She was an Air Force brat whose father was stationed at RAF Lakenheath. She had stayed on for the summer – she knew she didn’t have a prayer of finding a summer job in the UK. She was a small girl, trim and fit-looking, with brown eyes and long, straight dark brown hair. She wore a blue CU t-shirt and loose, comfortable khaki cargo shorts – she hadn’t bothered with shoes. She moved with the tigerish grace and economy of motion of a dancer.
Alicia looked Mediterranean – Greek, maybe – but wasn’t. Her family name was the tipoff – she was a Seneca Indian. “Pure-blooded Seneca” is an oxymoron. Alicia’s ancestor Mary Jemison, captured by raiders in 1758, was just one of many “White Indians” adopted into the Seneca Nation. Alicia’s European facial features were the expression of that part of her bloodline.
Air Force families are an eclectic lot – Alicia had learned belly dancing from a friend’s Lebanese mother at age 14, and had kept it up ever since. It had gotten her a job at Ali Baba’s, the local Persian restaurant – during the school year, she danced two 20-minute sets, twice a week. Her appearance was a bonus – in costume, she looked Mediterranean.
Now, she waited tables at lunchtime on the days she danced, and the dinner shift on three others. It all paid the same – a free meal and minimum wage – but half of her tip income came from dancing. Not this week though, or the next. This was a slow time of year, Mr. Mooshie had closed the restaurant so that he and his staff – many of them members of his large extended family – could take a vacation.
What I need right now is a workout, Alicia thought. She put a CD of Middle Eastern music in the player and got to work rehearsing her dance routine.
Alicia’s apartment building was a tall Victorian mansion that had been chopped up into student apartments long ago. Her second-floor apartment wasn’t air-conditioned, and the day was warm – before long, she had worked up a sweat. She had just finished dancing to the second tune when the phone rang.
“Hey, Alicia, it’s Natalie. Got time to talk?” Natalie Lasko was a friend from Alicia’s Freshman dorm – this fall, she would be living in the apartment across the hall.
“Nothing but time,” Alicia replied. “The restaurant’s closed for vacation ‘til a week from Monday. What’s the occasion?”
“I’m at my grandparents’ farm right now,” Natalie said. “My cousin Kelly is here too. Want to come and visit?”
“Where is it?” Alicia asked.
“Eastern Pennsylvania. You’re only about 4 hours away. I could pick you up at the bus station in...”
“D”you mind if Stacy Haviland comes with me?” Alicia interrupted. “You’ve met her– Shelly’s older sister. She’s got a car.”
“Grandma won’t mind,” Natalie said. “And there’s plenty of room here. I’ll email you directions and a map.”
Stacy lived in Apartment 1A with her older sister Ashley. Their younger sister Shelly, Natalie’s dorm room mate, was back home in Maine for the summer – she would be joining them this fall. Alicia looked out the front window. Parking was never a problem during the summer. Stacy’s car – a generic minivan, plain and practical – was parked out front.
Stacy’s apartment was locked up. Alicia walked to the back of the building to the former kitchen, now a common laundry room. Stacy wasn’t there either. Then onto the back porch, and she saw that her friends were sunning themselves on a blanket spread on the weedy back yard.
Both were in bikinis – Stacy’s was bright orange, Ashley’s was red. They shared a strong family resemblance. They were the same physical type – small and trim like their québécois forbears, with fit and shapely bodies. Stacy was the easy-going middle sister, eminently sensible, a 21-year-old Junior majoring in Hospitality Management. She had curly shoulder-length brown hair and soft brown eyes. She worked at the restaurant too, waiting tables and learning the business. Ashley was the oldest at 23, a first-born overachiever, a Grad student and teaching assistant in the Math department. She had short dark blonde hair and cool gray eyes.
“Hi, Alicia, come join us,” Ashley greeted her.
“Maybe later,” Alicia said. “Right now, I need to talk to Stacy. We’ve been invited to go visiting.”
“Where?” Stacy asked.
“Natalie’s grandparents’ farm in Pennsylvania. Amish country.”
“Men in black,” Ashley said.
“Women in black, like something out of the 1800’s,” Stacy said. She made a gesture that encompassed her body. “I like this better.”
“We’ve been out here long enough,” Ashley said. “Let’s go inside and get something to drink, and you can plan your trip.”
“You don’t mind us going off without you, sis?” Stacy asked as they walked back inside.
“Nope,” Ashley said. She had a key tied to her bikini string – she used it to unlock the door. “Gives me a chance to work on my thesis project without interruption.”
“Then I guess I’ll have to interrupt you now,” Stacy said with a devilish grin, and jumped Ashley.
They wrestled, rolling around on the floor, their struggle enlivened with squeals, giggles, yelps and girlish laughter. They were evenly matched – neither could quite manage to get the upper hand. I could join in, Alicia thought. But on whose side?
Alicia grabbed the nearest foot and tickled. “HAHAHA!” Ashley laughed. She lost her hold, and it was all over. Alicia and Stacy rolled Ashley onto her tummy and subdued her, and and Stacy sat on her facing aft.
“Hey! Get off!” Ashley yelled, and tried to buck Stacy off.
“Nope, I gotcha!” Stacy said, a little short of breath. “Thanks for the assist, Alicia.”
“Luck of the draw,” Alicia confessed. “I just tickled the nearest foot.”
“Turned out OK though,” Stacy said. “Let’s see now...” Stacy grabbed Ashley’s ankles, pulled, and wrapped a leg around Ashley’s shins, tucking the foot under the upraised knee of the other leg in the figure-four leg lock. “This ought to do it.”
Ashley stopped struggling – with both legs out of play, she lacked leverage. “OK, you got me,” she said in a resigned tone. “Get it over with.”
“I like it better when you fight it, sis,” Stacy said. “More of a challenge.”
“Oh, go to– Hee! HAHA! HAHAHA-HAHA-HAHAHA!” Ashley laughed as Stacy’s tickling fingernails flicked her arches. She laughed at the top of her lungs, squirming and straining and trying to buck Stacy off. Stacy kept her seat with the ease of long practice and tickled down Ashley’s arches, drawing figure-eight’s and other tickling shapes. Her well-manicured nails flicked and scratched the arches and onto the heels as streams of laughter poured out of Ashley. Then tiny flicks with the tips of her nails up both arches, not making much contact but tickling like crazy.
Ashley was struggling harder now, trying desperately to escape the tickling – she knew what was coming next. Stacy fooled her, held her toes back and tickled the soft skin underneath, forcing wave after wave of ticklish laughter. But Stacy knew where her sister’s feet were most ticklish, and saved the best for last. She tickled a stretched out sole in the exact middle, along the crease. Ashley howled with forced mirth as Stacy tickled across the balls of both feet to the other sole.
Stacy drew fast, looping figure-eight’s on the balls of both feet, covering every square inch of sensitive skin with unbearable tickling. Twice on each circuit, she hit the sweet spots and gave them a few extra nail flicks, and Ashley’s laughter went up a notch. Ashley laughed and laughed as Stacy spider-walked her nails on the balls of both feet. Then two-handed tickling in the middle of both soles – Ashley’s toes twitched and curled as her laughter went off the scale. Stacy speeded up, fingernails flying, tickling at warp speed. Ashley lost it and laughed herself breathless.
“Doin’ OK, sis?” Stacy asked.
Ashley took long deep breaths, eyes closed, tears of laughter running down her cheeks, trying to get her breathing and heart rate normal again. “I’ll... get you... for this,” she said.
Stacy grinned and tickled Ashley’s feet – Ashley burst into ticklish laughter again. “You’ll tickle me anyway – I’ll take my chances,” she said. She gave Ashley another 30 seconds of tickle torture, flicking both heels with a motion like chording a guitar, then quit and left her sister gasping.
Stacy stood and gave Ashley a hand up. “You are so gonna get it,” Ashley said. “Woo! I’m exhausted!”
“I wish we could capture that energy and use it some way,” Stacy said. “As much as we all tickle each other, we’d never have to pay a utility bill again.”
Tickle power? What an odd notion, thought Alicia. But she played along. “Too bad you’re busy this weekend, Ashley,” Alicia said. “It’s a 4-hour drive. It would be fun to tickle you on the way, and save on gas money while we’re doing it.”
Ashley snorted. “Dream on,” she said. “Let’s order a pizza – my stomach thinks my throat’s been cut.
***
Alicia and Stacy left early the next morning. Both of them wore jeans shorts and t-shirts – Stacy’s was white, Alicia’s Air Force blue with a USAF Winged Star logo in red-white-and-blue. Stacy drove north to the interstate and headed westward. As soon as she did, Alicia kicked off her flip-flops, propped her feet up on the dashboard and closed her eyes.
“Too bad Ashley couldn’t come,” Stacy said. “She’d find a way to keep you awake.”
Alicia opened one eye. “Lucky for me,” she said. She wiggled her toes. “I’m safe for now.” She closed her eye and went to sleep.
Alicia woke up an hour later, and discovered that they were already out of New England and into southern New York State. Two and a half hours after they started, Stacy turned southwest and crossed into Pennsylvania. They drove for another hour, then got off the interstate at Pembroke. The road was two-lane blacktop – it ran south through rolling hills. The area was cultivated, corn and alfalfa mostly, with occasional patches of woodlot. They saw black-and-white cows in pastures too, and an occasional farmer on a tractor.
They passed through a country town called Corfu, then more farms, and then the smaller town of Darien. There were several Amish communities in the area south of Darien, each of 25 families or so. At first glance, the Amish farms didn’t look any different from the rest. After a little thought, Alicia realized that the telephone and electric power lines didn’t connect to all of the farms. The farms without were Amish. All of those, unlike the other farms, had windmills on tall steel-frame towers, the old-fashioned type once ubiquitous on American farms. Stacy passed a black-painted buggy pulled by a horse. The driver and passenger were both elderly women – women in black, thought Alicia.
They stopped to check their navigation in the village of Bennington an hour before lunchtime. The place was little more than a wide spot in the road – just a crossroads, two churches and maybe two dozen houses. The churches were old ones. One of them was Lutheran – the sign in front of the other said “United Church of Christ”, but the raised letters over the door said Evangelische und Reformte Kirche in the Fraktur font.
“Two more miles,” Alicia said after a little study. “Look for a one-room schoolhouse. Map says it’s Amish – I guess they have their own.”
A few minutes later, they drove past a one-room school on the east side of the road, and crossed a ravine on a high earth fill with a culvert at the bottom. Alicia saw a silvery thread at the bottom of the ravine – a little creek. Natalie’s grandparents’ farm was just past the creek, the farm buildings were directly south of the schoolhouse.
The farm house was old, added to many times – it stood on a small rise overlooking the highway, screened by a row of big old maple trees. A wide porch went across the front of the house and wrapped around the south side. The graveled driveway turned off from the highway south of the house and curled around to the north, behind the house. Stacy parked and the girls piled out.
Natalie and Kelly were sitting on the side porch with Natalie’s grandparents – they came out to greet the newcomers.
Natalie Lasko was a petite girl with long fiery red hair, bright blue eyes and freckled fair skin. She was fit and athletic-looking without being muscular – she had played soccer in high school. She was cheerful and outgoing, with an even temper and a ready smile. She wore a green-and-white striped top with spaghetti straps, old gym shorts and flip-flops.
Kelly Sandler was 18 or so, a little cutie with shoulder-length brown hair, bright blue eyes, tanned fair skin and curves in all the right places. She had a dancer’s figure, very trim and fit-looking, and moved like a dancer too. She was barefoot, wearing jeans shorts and a black Pittsburg Steelers t-shirt.
“Have any trouble finding the place?” Natalie asked.
“Nope,” Stacy said. “Just as well – until we got to Bennington, the only people we saw to ask were two old Amish women.”
“They could have told you – they speak English,” Natalie said. “The Yoder family across the road are Old Order Amish. The Stolzfus family too – they own the farm behind ours. They’re good neighbors,” Natalie said. “Anyway, this is my cousin Kelly Sandler. She lives in Harrisburg. C’mon, I’ll introduce you to my grandparents.”
“Are you in college too, Kelly?” Alicia asked.
“Just got out of high school,” Kelly answered. “I’m going to Trismegistus University this fall to study Computer Science.”
“Hi, girls! Come and have a seat,” the old man called out as they approached – he was wearing a plaid shirt, overalls, work boots and a ball cap.
“Glad you could come,” his wife added. Natalie had her grandmother’s size, facial features and blue eyes – this was what Natalie would look like in another 50 yrs or so. She was in jeans, a ratty sweat shirt and sneakers.
“This is Stacy Haviland,” Natalie said. “She lives in the apartment downstairs from mine at school. This is Alicia Jemison, she lives across the hall.” She completed the introduction. “My grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Sandler.”
The big country kitchen opened off the side porch. The girls carried their gear indoors and through the kitchen to a hallway. Natalie’s grandmother led them up a steep flight of stairs with a right-angle turn at the top. Natalie and Kelly would bunk together in Natalie’s mom’s old room, the other two girls in Kelly’s dad’s room.
“Just like old times,” Mrs. Sandler said. “I grew up in a house like this. There were nine of us kids – six girls. I shared a bed with my younger sister until I got married.”
“Must have been crowded,” Alicia said.
“It never seemed that way to us at the time,” the old lady said. “It was just the way things were.” She paused, remembering. “Kinda nice in the winter, we kept each other warm. Back then, the only heat in the house was the wood stove in the kitchen and a Franklin stove in the parlor, and we banked those at night. We didn’t live all that differently than our Amish neighbors – there was no electricity until the REA brought it out here in the 1930’s.”
They had coffee in the kitchen. Natalie’s grandparents were retired, Alicia learned – this was no longer a working farm. Natalie’s mom and Uncle Ted had both gone away to college and hadn’t come back. The old man had kept farming until a few years ago, but now rented his land to a neighbor. This 160-acre farm had supported generations of Sandlers, but times had changed – the Amish excluded, a farmer just couldn’t make it any more on less than 600 acres.
Natalie took the others on a tour. A dirt track intersected the gravel driveway just behind the house. South of and parallel to the track was a long wooden building with a peaked roof. It had once been winter shelter for hogs on the ground floor, a chicken coop above – now it was used for general storage and a garage for the car and pickup truck. Beyond and in line was a big metal building, empty now, formerly a place to park and repair tractors and other farm machinery out of the weather.
Across the track to the north was a tall square wooden building – Natalie said that her twice-great-grandfather and his neighbors had built it. It still had a blacksmith shop, tack room and stalls, from when it had housed the farm’s horses and the smaller farm machinery of times past. The upper hayloft was empty.
The graveled driveway continued northward to a graveled flat big enough to turn a milk tanker truck around. The flat had been the site of an old barn in Natalie’s grandfather’s youth – he had built a big concrete-block barn with a half-octagon roof just north of that, oriented north-south. He had sold the old barn to an architect who wanted to build a big house with “rustic atmosphere”, and saved himself the trouble of pulling it down.
The land bounded by highway, house and barn was a kitchen garden and a small apple orchard. North of the barn, the land sloped downward into the creek ravine whose sides were far too steep to cultivate. That was pasture, dotted with grazing black-and-white cows.
On the south end of the barn was a sort of anteroom – it opened into the barn proper and into a much smaller building on the east that had once contained refrigerated holding tanks for the milk. The tall concrete silo connected to the west side of the anteroom, its curved shell forming the anteroom wall.
They looked into the barn – it was was empty, but still held a faint odor of cows. There was a wooden ladder bolted to the east wall about in the middle. Natalie climbed it and disappeared through a big open hatch – the others followed.
At first, all Alicia saw was shapes, but it got clearer as her eyes adjusted to the dim light that filtered in around the edges of a big double door on the east side. They were in a cavernous empty hayloft under the half-octagonal roof. There was just a little loose hay scattered here and there.
One big door had a smaller, people-sized door in it. Outside, Alicia saw that the ground had a gentle upward slope toward the east. A shallow flat had been cut into the slope to level an area for the barn. It had been backfilled on the east to create an earthen ramp to the big double door in the side of the hayloft, a ramp that allowed hay wagons to be taken inside for unloading. The girls came down the ramp and circled around to the north end of the barn. They walked north to the pasture and ducked under the barbed wire fence.
Natalie and Kelly were wearing sneakers, but the others were in flip-flops. The slope was steep, difficult footing – they finally took their sandals off and picked their way carefully down it, avoiding the meadow muffins and the grazing cows. The flow in the gravel-bottomed creek was sluggish. Water skimmers walked the surface, dragonflies droned above. The highway wasn’t far off – the stream crossed under it in a big culvert about 100 yards to the west – but there was little traffic.
“Does this creek have a name?” Alicia asked.
“Not even on the quad sheet – I checked,” Kelly answered. “And I’ve never heard it called anything but “the crick”. It’s too small.”
They started back upslope. Suddenly Stacy did a pirouette and landed on her butt.
“Your mom should’ve named you Grace,” Natalie said. “Are you OK?”
Stacy checked herself out. “Eww! I stepped in a cow flop!”
Kelly laughed. “It’ll wash off. A little shit’s not so bad, so long as you don’t have to shovel it.” She gave Stacy a hand up. “C’mon, we’ll wash it off at the barn.”
All four girls were puffing a little by the time they got back up to the top. There was a water hose on the north end of the barn. Natalie hosed off Stacy’s feet, then sprayed her butt.
“Hey!” Stacy yelled. “Why’d you do that?”
“Get the dirt off from when you sat down.”
Stacy growled and jumped Natalie. They wrestled for the hose, which of course got turned on and soaked both of them. The overspray got Alicia and Kelly too – they joined in, a four-way water fight, punctuated by squeals, laughter and various foul blows.
The water cut off, and the hose went limp. All four girls were dripping wet. Alicia looked over, and saw Natalie’s grandfather by the faucet. He had just shut the water off.
“Just the thing to brighten up the day,” the man said, grinning. “A wet t-shirt contest. Trying to give me a heart attack?”
Alicia wasn’t wearing a bra – good thing I’m wearing a blue shirt, she thought. Stacy wasn’t either, which was pretty obvious because her shirt was white. She yelped and covered herself with her hands.
“Now look what you’ve done, Grandpa!” Natalie said.
“OK, OK, I’m going!” he said. “Pretty good show anyway.”
Stacy blushed.
“Let’s change and hang this stuff up to dry,” Kelly said. “It’s almost dinner time.”
“Dinner?” Alicia asked. “I thought...”
“Grandma’s a farm wife,” Natalie explained. “She still cooks like one. Big breakfast that you work off by noon. Big noon meal that you work off in the afternoon. A light supper, because you’re finished working for the day.”
They changed into their jeans and dry shirts, and hung their wet clothes on the clothesline. Dinner was ready by the time they finished – fried chicken, potatoes and gravy, creamed early corn, biscuits, sliced tomatoes fresh from the garden, topped off with apple pie. Alicia knew she was eating too much, but couldn’t stop herself. She wasn’t the only one. They helped with the dishes – afterward, all of them were content to sit on the porch and digest for a while.
“I’d weigh 300 lbs if I ate like that all the time,” Stacy said. “I’m stuffed!”
“This was for us,” Kelly said. “They still eat their main meal at noon, but not like when this was still a working farm. If it was... well, Daddy said he ate 4,000 calories a day when he was our age, and never gained an ounce.”
Alicia kicked off her flip-flops and propped her feet up on the porch rail. The big meal, warm day and quiet surroundings combined to put her to sleep. She nodded off in her chair, oblivious to the conversation going on around her.
The laughter woke Alicia. She blinked and looked over. Natalie must have nodded off too, and Kelly had taken full advantage. She had Natalie’s ankles in an arm lock, tickling her feet with verve and gusto. Natalie laughed like a lunatic, squirming and bucking, trying desperately to escape the tickling.
Natalie’s feet were insanely, unbearably ticklish all over, so everything Kelly did drove her wild. Kelly flicked and scratched Natalie’s soles, traced tickling shapes in her arches, scrabbled her nails on the ticklish heels. She kept it up, fingers flying, flicking and scratching the heels, the arches, the soles while Natalie laughed and laughed. She scratched between Natalie’s toes, tickling between each pair and forcing more bursts of helpless laughter, then down the soles and arches to the heels, tickling both at once. Natalie laughed at the top of her lungs, red-faced, tears of laughter streaming down her cheeks. She wasn’t struggling any more, the tickling had completely overpowered her.
Kelly held Natalie on the edge, never letting her zone out, always letting her catch just enough breath to laugh. She tickled Natalie’s feet from toes to heels, bringing forth stream after stream of helpless laughter. She tickled side to side across the balls of both feet, getting on the creases in the middle of the soles, covering the sensitive skin with unbearable tickling. Natalie’s laughter went off the scale. Kelly kept it up for a minute or so, enjoying the ticklish laughter, then quit and released Natalie’s ankles. Natalie giggled weakly as the tickling sensation faded – Kelly had really gotten her good.
“I’ll get you for this, Kelly!” Natalie threatened good-naturedly. “I can still feel it!”
“That was a good one,” Alicia said. “Couldn’t have done better myself.”
“Lots of practice,” Kelly said. “It used to drive Natalie wild. Now she loves it. What did you do to her at college?”
“She made the mistake of tickling one of our dorm neighbors,” Alicia said. “Turned out she’d tangled with the Tennessee Toe Ticklers – Danielle and Tara were friends back home, some little town way back in the hills, and they’d been tickling each other for years. They got even, and then some.”
“It was the worst tickling I’d ever gotten, and I found out I liked it,” Natalie said. “It drove me crazy while it was happening, but afterward it was... exhilirating. Kelly and her brother just didn’t tickle me enough.”
“But the rest of us did,” Alicia said. “She returned the favor too – she turned into a pretty fair tickler herself.” There was probably more to it than Natalie let on, she thought. Alicia had experienced the tickle high herself, but Natalie was such an eager ticklee that Alicia suspected she was probably getting off on it.
“Kelly already found that out,” Natalie said. “I guess she needs a reminder.”
Kelly grinned impishly. “You’ll have to win a tickle fight first,” she said. “You’re lots more ticklish than I am.”
“Hold that thought,” Natalie said. “Let’s go for a walk instead. We can play tonight.”
Their shorts were dry by then. The girls changed into them and, like Natalie and Kelly, put their sneakers on – they had learned their lesson on their earlier hike.
The girls walked east on the dirt track, between two corn fields. The plants weren’t finished growing, but even so they were taller than the girls. The woods were in the northeast corner of the property, on ground dotted with glacial boulders – a mixed stand of oaks and maples and another of pine. The hardwoods had survived because the area was too rocky to cultivate, Natalie said. The CCC had planted the pines when her grandfather was a boy, back during the Depression. His father had tapped the maples and made maple syrup, but Grandpa had given that up when he took over the farm years ago. The syrup house was still there though, a low building with a stone chimney and a rusty tin roof, its clapboard siding weathered to a silvery gray.
The pines grew right down to the creek. The stream bed was steeper here, the water splashing over the rocky bottom. The source was just upstream, back in the hardwoods – a spring-fed pool maybe 50 yards across, with a natural dam of boulders.
“Hello! Anybody here?” Natalie called out. No answer. “OK, we’re good,” she said, and led them past the dam to the shore of the pond. Cat-tails grew around most of the shore, but there was a rocky place that gave easy access – one big stone slab jutted out over the water. A knotted rope was tied to an overhanging tree branch.
“This is the local swimming hole,” Kelly said. “Pretty, isn’t it?”
“It’s right on the property line with the farm behind. I yelled because Amish kids use it too,” Natalie explained. “But usually only on Thursday afternoon – that’s the least busy time of the week for the Amish.”
The woodlot backed up on another cultivated field, this one of alfalfa, with a barbed wire fence separating them. The farm buildings in the distance didn’t look any different from the ones Alicia had seen already, but the two men in the distance... Alicia’s eyesight was better than 20/20. She checked them out: bearded, white shirts, dark trousers and vests, broad-brim straw hats. Amish.
They backtracked through the pines, carpeted with a thick layer of old needles. Alicia looked back at a noise behind her. She thought she saw a dark shadow, but couldn’t be sure – it was gone before she got a good look. A deer? Surely there were no bears in these woods!
Alicia’s inattention cost her – something rolled under her foot. She yelped, overbalanced and went down on her tummy. She was about to pick herself up when she saw a long white skull grinning at her from under a thin covering of pine needles. She screamed, practically levitated back to vertical and backed up until a tree trunk stopped her.
“Alicia! What’s the matter?” Natalie said.
Alicia just pointed.
“Oh! That’s just Old Pete,” Natalie said. “My great grandpa sold his horses to the Amish during World War II – bought a tractor because Grandpa and his brothers all went in the Army. Old Pete was too old to sell – he got turned out to pasture.” She probed around with her toe and exposed a thigh bone, some long rib bones and some vertebrae the size of two fists. “He died when Mom was a kid – she said the kids around here used to sword fight with his ribs.”
“I... wasn’t expecting anything like that,” Alicia said. “Why’d they leave him here?”
“Think of how much trouble it would be to bury a horse,” Natalie said. “Not to mention dragging him through the woods to where you could bury him. He wasn’t causing any trouble here, so they let the wild animals get the benefit of him.”
They walked back westward along the creek, ducked under another fence and continued along the creek through the pasture. Alicia paid careful attention to where she put her feet, and noticed that Stacy was doing the same.
They ended up back below the barn, and made the climb to the flat. They cut through the apple orchard and kitchen garden to the house. Natalie’s grandparents were sitting on the side porch. Her grandmother had made iced tea – it was welcome after their exertion.
“Alicia met Old Pete today, Grandpa,” Kelly said with a wicked grin. “I’m surprised you didn’t hear her scream all the way up here.”
Alicia blushed. “There was something following us in the woods,” she said. “I looked back and tripped. The skull surprised me.”
“No kidding!” Natalie said. “You haven’t spent much time in the country, have you?”
Alicia shook her head. “I grew up on Air Force bases, in places like Okinawa and Korea, Germany and England. Even rural areas there are pretty built up. This seems like the end of the world.”
“Hey, everybody, let’s spend the night with Old Pete,” Stacy said mischievously. “A camp-out.”
But the others vetoed the idea. Some other time maybe, when they were better prepared. Alicia was secretly relieved – this region had been settled nearly 300 yrs ago, but she still wasn’t 100% sure about the bears. Some Indian I am, she thought – that humming noise was generations of her ancestors turning over in their graves.
The girls had their after-supper coffee on the porch. Alicia and Natalie walked down to the road to check the mail box afterward. Across the road, the Yoder family were relaxing after the end of the day’s work.
Both parents were sitting on a bench on their front porch with a boy of 16 or so. Three boys maybe 14, 12 and 10 yrs old and a trim brunette in her late teens were playing with a dog on the lawn. Alicia checked them out.
Amos Yoder was a powerful looking man about 40 yrs old with a full beard but no mustache. He wore a white shirt, dark trousers and vest, a dark jacket without lapels, black boondocker shoes and a low-crowned, broad-brim straw hat. The teenage boy was beardless – he and his little brothers were dressed like their father, except that the two youngest boys were barefoot.
Rachel Yoder had her gray-streaked brown hair done up in a bun. She wore a black bonnet, a black apron over her plain, dark-blue long dress, and black shoes with black cotton stockings. She had no jewelry of any sort. Her daughter was dressed pretty much the same, a brunette about medium height with long wavy hair and a trim shape that her dark green dress couldn’t quite disguise. Her face and hands were tanned from outdoor work. She had taken off her shoes and stockings, barefoot like her brothers – good legs too, if a little pale, from what little Alicia could see as the girl moved.
“The girl is Leah Yoder,” Natalie said. “She’s my age. We played together sometimes when we were little. She has a married sister a few years older.” Natalie paused, then went on. “The Amish marry young. It’s pretty unusual to find one who’s still unmarried at 20 – Leah’s almost an old maid by their standards,” Natalie said. “Unmarried women wear their hair long, married women wear it in a bun. Married Amish men grow beards and don’t cut ‘em – old grandpas have beards like Santa Claus.”
“Why no mustache?” Alicia asked.
“There’s Biblical authority for beards,” Natalie answered. “But mustaches are associated with warriors and soldiers. The Amish are pacifists, so mustaches are forbidden.”
Alicia noticed something else about the Yoder farmhouse – like the Sandler house, it had an LPG tank next to it. “Do they use gas?” she asked, a little surprised.
“Yah, they don’t shun modernity,” Natalie said. “Just connection to the outside world. They use gas to cook, make hot water and heat their homes, just like we do. There are gas-powered refrigerators too, and most Amish people have ‘em. And gas lights with Coleman-type mantles work every bit as well as electric lights.”
Natalie started back up the driveway to the house, with Alicia following. “And in case you’re wondering, they have indoor plumbing too,” she said. “They use the windmills to pump the water.”
They took the mail indoors and came back out onto the porch. Kelly kicked off her flip-flops and went out onto the lawn. She did some stretching and limbering-up exercises – the same kind I do, Alicia thought. She looks like a dancer. Ballet maybe?
Kelly stood at attention, arms at her sides, then went into a martial arts stance. The training kata she did next was every bit as stylized and graceful as a dance. She finished and came back to attention, then relaxed.
“Join me, Alicia?” Kelly invited. “We could spar a little.”
“I’ve never done martial arts,” Alicia said. “I’m a dancer. I thought you were too – you look like one.”
“The way you move, I thought you did karate,” Kelly said. “I’ve had dance training,” she continued. “It helped me with karate – the discipline’s much the same. You could make Black Belt in just a few years if you wanted to. C’mon, I’ll show you the basics.”
Alicia slipped off her flip-flops and joined Kelly on the lawn. The basic moves – advance and retreat, high and low blocks, kicks, blows, and so forth – weren’t much like what she was used to. But they depended on mental discipline, physical conditioning, body awareness, balance and precision. Those were things that Alicia had in abundance.
It was a good workout. The girls did some stretching exercises afterward. Maybe there’s something to this, Alicia thought. I’ll have to look into...
“BANZAI!” Kelly yelled. The girl was unbelievably fast – before Alicia quite knew what was happening, she was on her tummy on the grass, with Kelly sitting on her facing aft.
“Hey!” Alicia yelled. “No fair! You didn’t give me any warning!”
“That’s right,” Kelly said sweetly. “You should’ve been paying attention. It’s called situational awareness.” She grabbed Alicia’s ankles and wrapped a leg around Alicia’s in the figure-four leg lock. “Eww! Grass stains!” she said. “I guess I’ll have to tickle ‘em clean!”
“NOOO! NOT THAT!” Alicia yelled. She struggled, but to no avail – she was had. “Oh SHIT! Hehe! HAHAHA-HAHAHAHA-HAHAHA!” as Kelly’s fingernails flicked and scratched her ticklish soles.
Kelly grabbed Alicia’s right foot with her left hand and made a claw of her right hand. Alicia laughed at the top of her lungs as Kelly raked her nails down the foot, drawing four parallel zig-zag lines and applying just enough pressure to tickle unbearably. Kelly repeated the tickle half a dozen times or so, then did the same to Alicia’s other foot, while wave after wave of helpless laughter poured out.
Kelly spider-walked her nails down Alicia’s arches, scrabbled her nails on both heels while Alicia laughed like a maniac. Alicia laughed her head off as Kelly held back her toes and drew fast, looping figure-eight’s around the balls of both feet. She flicked her nails along the creases in the exact centers of Alicia’s soles as helpless laughter streamed from Alicia. Then Kelly tickled side to side under all ten toes, and Alicia went wild, squirming and bucking and trying desperately to pull her feet away.
“Looks like I found the sweet spot!” Kelly said, and picked up the pace. It was more than Alicia could bear – she lost it and laughed herself breathless.
Kelly dismounted. Alicia rolled over and sat up, breathing hard, and brushed her hair back out of her face. She shuffled her feet to get the tickle off, then inspected a sole. “Still some dirt,” she said. “Nice try though.”
Kelly grinned. “I could try again,” she said hopefully.
“Thanks just the same,” said Alicia. “I’ll use soap and water instead.
“Spoilsport!” Kelly said. “Let’s gang up on Stacy!”
“Let’s not,” Mrs. Sandler said from the back door. “Kelly, this is the second time today. You know how your grandfather feels about tickling.”
“Sorry, Grandma,” Kelly said, instantly contrite.
“It weirds Grandpa out,” Natalie explained. “Mom said he used to raise hell when Uncle Ted tickled her. Mom and her friends went elsewhere or used the syrup house – out of sight, out of mind.”
The old couple still kept farmer’s hours – the habit of a lifetime is hard to break. They were in bed by 9 PM. The girls sat on the porch chatting. After a while, Alicia yawned and stretched, and that got everybody else started. It was only 10 PM, but they had had an active day. They took turns in the shower and headed upstairs to bed.
Alicia changed into her night shirt, then went back downstairs. She walked away from the house toward the field on the east. She looked up at the sky. Air bases were lit up like Christmas in peacetime – only the brightest stars were visible, and only under ideal conditions. Most of East Asia, Europe and New England had enough sky glow to make star-gazing pretty questionable. But there were no lights here, a new moon, and not a cloud in the sky. The stars were diamonds on dark velvet, more of them than she had ever seen. The Milky Way was like a river across the sky.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” Natalie said quietly. “Even out here, they’re not usually this bright.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Alicia confessed. “Thank you for having me, Natalie. Seeing this was worth the trip, all by itself.”
“Look! A shooting star!” Natalie said. “Make a wish!”
No need, thought Alicia. The night was already perfect.
***
Copyright 2005 by the author
Author’s Note: This story turned into a novella, 30+ pages of 10-point type, because I couldn’t tell it in anything shorter. It’s closely related to “Dani Deaver” and my other stories set at Commonwealth University. It’s also closely related to another – you’ll know which when you get there. Hope you enjoy it – as always, feedback is encouraged and welcome.
Alicia Jemison laid her book aside, stood up and stretched. Should have found something else to read, she grumbled to herself. She liked David Weber’s science-fiction novels about Honor Harrington, a female Horatio Hornblower of the far future, but three of them back-to-back was a bit much. Still, there wasn’t much else to do in a college town on a summer Thursday afternoon.
Alicia was 19 – she would be a Sophomore at Commonwealth University this fall. She was an Air Force brat whose father was stationed at RAF Lakenheath. She had stayed on for the summer – she knew she didn’t have a prayer of finding a summer job in the UK. She was a small girl, trim and fit-looking, with brown eyes and long, straight dark brown hair. She wore a blue CU t-shirt and loose, comfortable khaki cargo shorts – she hadn’t bothered with shoes. She moved with the tigerish grace and economy of motion of a dancer.
Alicia looked Mediterranean – Greek, maybe – but wasn’t. Her family name was the tipoff – she was a Seneca Indian. “Pure-blooded Seneca” is an oxymoron. Alicia’s ancestor Mary Jemison, captured by raiders in 1758, was just one of many “White Indians” adopted into the Seneca Nation. Alicia’s European facial features were the expression of that part of her bloodline.
Air Force families are an eclectic lot – Alicia had learned belly dancing from a friend’s Lebanese mother at age 14, and had kept it up ever since. It had gotten her a job at Ali Baba’s, the local Persian restaurant – during the school year, she danced two 20-minute sets, twice a week. Her appearance was a bonus – in costume, she looked Mediterranean.
Now, she waited tables at lunchtime on the days she danced, and the dinner shift on three others. It all paid the same – a free meal and minimum wage – but half of her tip income came from dancing. Not this week though, or the next. This was a slow time of year, Mr. Mooshie had closed the restaurant so that he and his staff – many of them members of his large extended family – could take a vacation.
What I need right now is a workout, Alicia thought. She put a CD of Middle Eastern music in the player and got to work rehearsing her dance routine.
Alicia’s apartment building was a tall Victorian mansion that had been chopped up into student apartments long ago. Her second-floor apartment wasn’t air-conditioned, and the day was warm – before long, she had worked up a sweat. She had just finished dancing to the second tune when the phone rang.
“Hey, Alicia, it’s Natalie. Got time to talk?” Natalie Lasko was a friend from Alicia’s Freshman dorm – this fall, she would be living in the apartment across the hall.
“Nothing but time,” Alicia replied. “The restaurant’s closed for vacation ‘til a week from Monday. What’s the occasion?”
“I’m at my grandparents’ farm right now,” Natalie said. “My cousin Kelly is here too. Want to come and visit?”
“Where is it?” Alicia asked.
“Eastern Pennsylvania. You’re only about 4 hours away. I could pick you up at the bus station in...”
“D”you mind if Stacy Haviland comes with me?” Alicia interrupted. “You’ve met her– Shelly’s older sister. She’s got a car.”
“Grandma won’t mind,” Natalie said. “And there’s plenty of room here. I’ll email you directions and a map.”
Stacy lived in Apartment 1A with her older sister Ashley. Their younger sister Shelly, Natalie’s dorm room mate, was back home in Maine for the summer – she would be joining them this fall. Alicia looked out the front window. Parking was never a problem during the summer. Stacy’s car – a generic minivan, plain and practical – was parked out front.
Stacy’s apartment was locked up. Alicia walked to the back of the building to the former kitchen, now a common laundry room. Stacy wasn’t there either. Then onto the back porch, and she saw that her friends were sunning themselves on a blanket spread on the weedy back yard.
Both were in bikinis – Stacy’s was bright orange, Ashley’s was red. They shared a strong family resemblance. They were the same physical type – small and trim like their québécois forbears, with fit and shapely bodies. Stacy was the easy-going middle sister, eminently sensible, a 21-year-old Junior majoring in Hospitality Management. She had curly shoulder-length brown hair and soft brown eyes. She worked at the restaurant too, waiting tables and learning the business. Ashley was the oldest at 23, a first-born overachiever, a Grad student and teaching assistant in the Math department. She had short dark blonde hair and cool gray eyes.
“Hi, Alicia, come join us,” Ashley greeted her.
“Maybe later,” Alicia said. “Right now, I need to talk to Stacy. We’ve been invited to go visiting.”
“Where?” Stacy asked.
“Natalie’s grandparents’ farm in Pennsylvania. Amish country.”
“Men in black,” Ashley said.
“Women in black, like something out of the 1800’s,” Stacy said. She made a gesture that encompassed her body. “I like this better.”
“We’ve been out here long enough,” Ashley said. “Let’s go inside and get something to drink, and you can plan your trip.”
“You don’t mind us going off without you, sis?” Stacy asked as they walked back inside.
“Nope,” Ashley said. She had a key tied to her bikini string – she used it to unlock the door. “Gives me a chance to work on my thesis project without interruption.”
“Then I guess I’ll have to interrupt you now,” Stacy said with a devilish grin, and jumped Ashley.
They wrestled, rolling around on the floor, their struggle enlivened with squeals, giggles, yelps and girlish laughter. They were evenly matched – neither could quite manage to get the upper hand. I could join in, Alicia thought. But on whose side?
Alicia grabbed the nearest foot and tickled. “HAHAHA!” Ashley laughed. She lost her hold, and it was all over. Alicia and Stacy rolled Ashley onto her tummy and subdued her, and and Stacy sat on her facing aft.
“Hey! Get off!” Ashley yelled, and tried to buck Stacy off.
“Nope, I gotcha!” Stacy said, a little short of breath. “Thanks for the assist, Alicia.”
“Luck of the draw,” Alicia confessed. “I just tickled the nearest foot.”
“Turned out OK though,” Stacy said. “Let’s see now...” Stacy grabbed Ashley’s ankles, pulled, and wrapped a leg around Ashley’s shins, tucking the foot under the upraised knee of the other leg in the figure-four leg lock. “This ought to do it.”
Ashley stopped struggling – with both legs out of play, she lacked leverage. “OK, you got me,” she said in a resigned tone. “Get it over with.”
“I like it better when you fight it, sis,” Stacy said. “More of a challenge.”
“Oh, go to– Hee! HAHA! HAHAHA-HAHA-HAHAHA!” Ashley laughed as Stacy’s tickling fingernails flicked her arches. She laughed at the top of her lungs, squirming and straining and trying to buck Stacy off. Stacy kept her seat with the ease of long practice and tickled down Ashley’s arches, drawing figure-eight’s and other tickling shapes. Her well-manicured nails flicked and scratched the arches and onto the heels as streams of laughter poured out of Ashley. Then tiny flicks with the tips of her nails up both arches, not making much contact but tickling like crazy.
Ashley was struggling harder now, trying desperately to escape the tickling – she knew what was coming next. Stacy fooled her, held her toes back and tickled the soft skin underneath, forcing wave after wave of ticklish laughter. But Stacy knew where her sister’s feet were most ticklish, and saved the best for last. She tickled a stretched out sole in the exact middle, along the crease. Ashley howled with forced mirth as Stacy tickled across the balls of both feet to the other sole.
Stacy drew fast, looping figure-eight’s on the balls of both feet, covering every square inch of sensitive skin with unbearable tickling. Twice on each circuit, she hit the sweet spots and gave them a few extra nail flicks, and Ashley’s laughter went up a notch. Ashley laughed and laughed as Stacy spider-walked her nails on the balls of both feet. Then two-handed tickling in the middle of both soles – Ashley’s toes twitched and curled as her laughter went off the scale. Stacy speeded up, fingernails flying, tickling at warp speed. Ashley lost it and laughed herself breathless.
“Doin’ OK, sis?” Stacy asked.
Ashley took long deep breaths, eyes closed, tears of laughter running down her cheeks, trying to get her breathing and heart rate normal again. “I’ll... get you... for this,” she said.
Stacy grinned and tickled Ashley’s feet – Ashley burst into ticklish laughter again. “You’ll tickle me anyway – I’ll take my chances,” she said. She gave Ashley another 30 seconds of tickle torture, flicking both heels with a motion like chording a guitar, then quit and left her sister gasping.
Stacy stood and gave Ashley a hand up. “You are so gonna get it,” Ashley said. “Woo! I’m exhausted!”
“I wish we could capture that energy and use it some way,” Stacy said. “As much as we all tickle each other, we’d never have to pay a utility bill again.”
Tickle power? What an odd notion, thought Alicia. But she played along. “Too bad you’re busy this weekend, Ashley,” Alicia said. “It’s a 4-hour drive. It would be fun to tickle you on the way, and save on gas money while we’re doing it.”
Ashley snorted. “Dream on,” she said. “Let’s order a pizza – my stomach thinks my throat’s been cut.
***
Alicia and Stacy left early the next morning. Both of them wore jeans shorts and t-shirts – Stacy’s was white, Alicia’s Air Force blue with a USAF Winged Star logo in red-white-and-blue. Stacy drove north to the interstate and headed westward. As soon as she did, Alicia kicked off her flip-flops, propped her feet up on the dashboard and closed her eyes.
“Too bad Ashley couldn’t come,” Stacy said. “She’d find a way to keep you awake.”
Alicia opened one eye. “Lucky for me,” she said. She wiggled her toes. “I’m safe for now.” She closed her eye and went to sleep.
Alicia woke up an hour later, and discovered that they were already out of New England and into southern New York State. Two and a half hours after they started, Stacy turned southwest and crossed into Pennsylvania. They drove for another hour, then got off the interstate at Pembroke. The road was two-lane blacktop – it ran south through rolling hills. The area was cultivated, corn and alfalfa mostly, with occasional patches of woodlot. They saw black-and-white cows in pastures too, and an occasional farmer on a tractor.
They passed through a country town called Corfu, then more farms, and then the smaller town of Darien. There were several Amish communities in the area south of Darien, each of 25 families or so. At first glance, the Amish farms didn’t look any different from the rest. After a little thought, Alicia realized that the telephone and electric power lines didn’t connect to all of the farms. The farms without were Amish. All of those, unlike the other farms, had windmills on tall steel-frame towers, the old-fashioned type once ubiquitous on American farms. Stacy passed a black-painted buggy pulled by a horse. The driver and passenger were both elderly women – women in black, thought Alicia.
They stopped to check their navigation in the village of Bennington an hour before lunchtime. The place was little more than a wide spot in the road – just a crossroads, two churches and maybe two dozen houses. The churches were old ones. One of them was Lutheran – the sign in front of the other said “United Church of Christ”, but the raised letters over the door said Evangelische und Reformte Kirche in the Fraktur font.
“Two more miles,” Alicia said after a little study. “Look for a one-room schoolhouse. Map says it’s Amish – I guess they have their own.”
A few minutes later, they drove past a one-room school on the east side of the road, and crossed a ravine on a high earth fill with a culvert at the bottom. Alicia saw a silvery thread at the bottom of the ravine – a little creek. Natalie’s grandparents’ farm was just past the creek, the farm buildings were directly south of the schoolhouse.
The farm house was old, added to many times – it stood on a small rise overlooking the highway, screened by a row of big old maple trees. A wide porch went across the front of the house and wrapped around the south side. The graveled driveway turned off from the highway south of the house and curled around to the north, behind the house. Stacy parked and the girls piled out.
Natalie and Kelly were sitting on the side porch with Natalie’s grandparents – they came out to greet the newcomers.
Natalie Lasko was a petite girl with long fiery red hair, bright blue eyes and freckled fair skin. She was fit and athletic-looking without being muscular – she had played soccer in high school. She was cheerful and outgoing, with an even temper and a ready smile. She wore a green-and-white striped top with spaghetti straps, old gym shorts and flip-flops.
Kelly Sandler was 18 or so, a little cutie with shoulder-length brown hair, bright blue eyes, tanned fair skin and curves in all the right places. She had a dancer’s figure, very trim and fit-looking, and moved like a dancer too. She was barefoot, wearing jeans shorts and a black Pittsburg Steelers t-shirt.
“Have any trouble finding the place?” Natalie asked.
“Nope,” Stacy said. “Just as well – until we got to Bennington, the only people we saw to ask were two old Amish women.”
“They could have told you – they speak English,” Natalie said. “The Yoder family across the road are Old Order Amish. The Stolzfus family too – they own the farm behind ours. They’re good neighbors,” Natalie said. “Anyway, this is my cousin Kelly Sandler. She lives in Harrisburg. C’mon, I’ll introduce you to my grandparents.”
“Are you in college too, Kelly?” Alicia asked.
“Just got out of high school,” Kelly answered. “I’m going to Trismegistus University this fall to study Computer Science.”
“Hi, girls! Come and have a seat,” the old man called out as they approached – he was wearing a plaid shirt, overalls, work boots and a ball cap.
“Glad you could come,” his wife added. Natalie had her grandmother’s size, facial features and blue eyes – this was what Natalie would look like in another 50 yrs or so. She was in jeans, a ratty sweat shirt and sneakers.
“This is Stacy Haviland,” Natalie said. “She lives in the apartment downstairs from mine at school. This is Alicia Jemison, she lives across the hall.” She completed the introduction. “My grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Sandler.”
The big country kitchen opened off the side porch. The girls carried their gear indoors and through the kitchen to a hallway. Natalie’s grandmother led them up a steep flight of stairs with a right-angle turn at the top. Natalie and Kelly would bunk together in Natalie’s mom’s old room, the other two girls in Kelly’s dad’s room.
“Just like old times,” Mrs. Sandler said. “I grew up in a house like this. There were nine of us kids – six girls. I shared a bed with my younger sister until I got married.”
“Must have been crowded,” Alicia said.
“It never seemed that way to us at the time,” the old lady said. “It was just the way things were.” She paused, remembering. “Kinda nice in the winter, we kept each other warm. Back then, the only heat in the house was the wood stove in the kitchen and a Franklin stove in the parlor, and we banked those at night. We didn’t live all that differently than our Amish neighbors – there was no electricity until the REA brought it out here in the 1930’s.”
They had coffee in the kitchen. Natalie’s grandparents were retired, Alicia learned – this was no longer a working farm. Natalie’s mom and Uncle Ted had both gone away to college and hadn’t come back. The old man had kept farming until a few years ago, but now rented his land to a neighbor. This 160-acre farm had supported generations of Sandlers, but times had changed – the Amish excluded, a farmer just couldn’t make it any more on less than 600 acres.
Natalie took the others on a tour. A dirt track intersected the gravel driveway just behind the house. South of and parallel to the track was a long wooden building with a peaked roof. It had once been winter shelter for hogs on the ground floor, a chicken coop above – now it was used for general storage and a garage for the car and pickup truck. Beyond and in line was a big metal building, empty now, formerly a place to park and repair tractors and other farm machinery out of the weather.
Across the track to the north was a tall square wooden building – Natalie said that her twice-great-grandfather and his neighbors had built it. It still had a blacksmith shop, tack room and stalls, from when it had housed the farm’s horses and the smaller farm machinery of times past. The upper hayloft was empty.
The graveled driveway continued northward to a graveled flat big enough to turn a milk tanker truck around. The flat had been the site of an old barn in Natalie’s grandfather’s youth – he had built a big concrete-block barn with a half-octagon roof just north of that, oriented north-south. He had sold the old barn to an architect who wanted to build a big house with “rustic atmosphere”, and saved himself the trouble of pulling it down.
The land bounded by highway, house and barn was a kitchen garden and a small apple orchard. North of the barn, the land sloped downward into the creek ravine whose sides were far too steep to cultivate. That was pasture, dotted with grazing black-and-white cows.
On the south end of the barn was a sort of anteroom – it opened into the barn proper and into a much smaller building on the east that had once contained refrigerated holding tanks for the milk. The tall concrete silo connected to the west side of the anteroom, its curved shell forming the anteroom wall.
They looked into the barn – it was was empty, but still held a faint odor of cows. There was a wooden ladder bolted to the east wall about in the middle. Natalie climbed it and disappeared through a big open hatch – the others followed.
At first, all Alicia saw was shapes, but it got clearer as her eyes adjusted to the dim light that filtered in around the edges of a big double door on the east side. They were in a cavernous empty hayloft under the half-octagonal roof. There was just a little loose hay scattered here and there.
One big door had a smaller, people-sized door in it. Outside, Alicia saw that the ground had a gentle upward slope toward the east. A shallow flat had been cut into the slope to level an area for the barn. It had been backfilled on the east to create an earthen ramp to the big double door in the side of the hayloft, a ramp that allowed hay wagons to be taken inside for unloading. The girls came down the ramp and circled around to the north end of the barn. They walked north to the pasture and ducked under the barbed wire fence.
Natalie and Kelly were wearing sneakers, but the others were in flip-flops. The slope was steep, difficult footing – they finally took their sandals off and picked their way carefully down it, avoiding the meadow muffins and the grazing cows. The flow in the gravel-bottomed creek was sluggish. Water skimmers walked the surface, dragonflies droned above. The highway wasn’t far off – the stream crossed under it in a big culvert about 100 yards to the west – but there was little traffic.
“Does this creek have a name?” Alicia asked.
“Not even on the quad sheet – I checked,” Kelly answered. “And I’ve never heard it called anything but “the crick”. It’s too small.”
They started back upslope. Suddenly Stacy did a pirouette and landed on her butt.
“Your mom should’ve named you Grace,” Natalie said. “Are you OK?”
Stacy checked herself out. “Eww! I stepped in a cow flop!”
Kelly laughed. “It’ll wash off. A little shit’s not so bad, so long as you don’t have to shovel it.” She gave Stacy a hand up. “C’mon, we’ll wash it off at the barn.”
All four girls were puffing a little by the time they got back up to the top. There was a water hose on the north end of the barn. Natalie hosed off Stacy’s feet, then sprayed her butt.
“Hey!” Stacy yelled. “Why’d you do that?”
“Get the dirt off from when you sat down.”
Stacy growled and jumped Natalie. They wrestled for the hose, which of course got turned on and soaked both of them. The overspray got Alicia and Kelly too – they joined in, a four-way water fight, punctuated by squeals, laughter and various foul blows.
The water cut off, and the hose went limp. All four girls were dripping wet. Alicia looked over, and saw Natalie’s grandfather by the faucet. He had just shut the water off.
“Just the thing to brighten up the day,” the man said, grinning. “A wet t-shirt contest. Trying to give me a heart attack?”
Alicia wasn’t wearing a bra – good thing I’m wearing a blue shirt, she thought. Stacy wasn’t either, which was pretty obvious because her shirt was white. She yelped and covered herself with her hands.
“Now look what you’ve done, Grandpa!” Natalie said.
“OK, OK, I’m going!” he said. “Pretty good show anyway.”
Stacy blushed.
“Let’s change and hang this stuff up to dry,” Kelly said. “It’s almost dinner time.”
“Dinner?” Alicia asked. “I thought...”
“Grandma’s a farm wife,” Natalie explained. “She still cooks like one. Big breakfast that you work off by noon. Big noon meal that you work off in the afternoon. A light supper, because you’re finished working for the day.”
They changed into their jeans and dry shirts, and hung their wet clothes on the clothesline. Dinner was ready by the time they finished – fried chicken, potatoes and gravy, creamed early corn, biscuits, sliced tomatoes fresh from the garden, topped off with apple pie. Alicia knew she was eating too much, but couldn’t stop herself. She wasn’t the only one. They helped with the dishes – afterward, all of them were content to sit on the porch and digest for a while.
“I’d weigh 300 lbs if I ate like that all the time,” Stacy said. “I’m stuffed!”
“This was for us,” Kelly said. “They still eat their main meal at noon, but not like when this was still a working farm. If it was... well, Daddy said he ate 4,000 calories a day when he was our age, and never gained an ounce.”
Alicia kicked off her flip-flops and propped her feet up on the porch rail. The big meal, warm day and quiet surroundings combined to put her to sleep. She nodded off in her chair, oblivious to the conversation going on around her.
The laughter woke Alicia. She blinked and looked over. Natalie must have nodded off too, and Kelly had taken full advantage. She had Natalie’s ankles in an arm lock, tickling her feet with verve and gusto. Natalie laughed like a lunatic, squirming and bucking, trying desperately to escape the tickling.
Natalie’s feet were insanely, unbearably ticklish all over, so everything Kelly did drove her wild. Kelly flicked and scratched Natalie’s soles, traced tickling shapes in her arches, scrabbled her nails on the ticklish heels. She kept it up, fingers flying, flicking and scratching the heels, the arches, the soles while Natalie laughed and laughed. She scratched between Natalie’s toes, tickling between each pair and forcing more bursts of helpless laughter, then down the soles and arches to the heels, tickling both at once. Natalie laughed at the top of her lungs, red-faced, tears of laughter streaming down her cheeks. She wasn’t struggling any more, the tickling had completely overpowered her.
Kelly held Natalie on the edge, never letting her zone out, always letting her catch just enough breath to laugh. She tickled Natalie’s feet from toes to heels, bringing forth stream after stream of helpless laughter. She tickled side to side across the balls of both feet, getting on the creases in the middle of the soles, covering the sensitive skin with unbearable tickling. Natalie’s laughter went off the scale. Kelly kept it up for a minute or so, enjoying the ticklish laughter, then quit and released Natalie’s ankles. Natalie giggled weakly as the tickling sensation faded – Kelly had really gotten her good.
“I’ll get you for this, Kelly!” Natalie threatened good-naturedly. “I can still feel it!”
“That was a good one,” Alicia said. “Couldn’t have done better myself.”
“Lots of practice,” Kelly said. “It used to drive Natalie wild. Now she loves it. What did you do to her at college?”
“She made the mistake of tickling one of our dorm neighbors,” Alicia said. “Turned out she’d tangled with the Tennessee Toe Ticklers – Danielle and Tara were friends back home, some little town way back in the hills, and they’d been tickling each other for years. They got even, and then some.”
“It was the worst tickling I’d ever gotten, and I found out I liked it,” Natalie said. “It drove me crazy while it was happening, but afterward it was... exhilirating. Kelly and her brother just didn’t tickle me enough.”
“But the rest of us did,” Alicia said. “She returned the favor too – she turned into a pretty fair tickler herself.” There was probably more to it than Natalie let on, she thought. Alicia had experienced the tickle high herself, but Natalie was such an eager ticklee that Alicia suspected she was probably getting off on it.
“Kelly already found that out,” Natalie said. “I guess she needs a reminder.”
Kelly grinned impishly. “You’ll have to win a tickle fight first,” she said. “You’re lots more ticklish than I am.”
“Hold that thought,” Natalie said. “Let’s go for a walk instead. We can play tonight.”
Their shorts were dry by then. The girls changed into them and, like Natalie and Kelly, put their sneakers on – they had learned their lesson on their earlier hike.
The girls walked east on the dirt track, between two corn fields. The plants weren’t finished growing, but even so they were taller than the girls. The woods were in the northeast corner of the property, on ground dotted with glacial boulders – a mixed stand of oaks and maples and another of pine. The hardwoods had survived because the area was too rocky to cultivate, Natalie said. The CCC had planted the pines when her grandfather was a boy, back during the Depression. His father had tapped the maples and made maple syrup, but Grandpa had given that up when he took over the farm years ago. The syrup house was still there though, a low building with a stone chimney and a rusty tin roof, its clapboard siding weathered to a silvery gray.
The pines grew right down to the creek. The stream bed was steeper here, the water splashing over the rocky bottom. The source was just upstream, back in the hardwoods – a spring-fed pool maybe 50 yards across, with a natural dam of boulders.
“Hello! Anybody here?” Natalie called out. No answer. “OK, we’re good,” she said, and led them past the dam to the shore of the pond. Cat-tails grew around most of the shore, but there was a rocky place that gave easy access – one big stone slab jutted out over the water. A knotted rope was tied to an overhanging tree branch.
“This is the local swimming hole,” Kelly said. “Pretty, isn’t it?”
“It’s right on the property line with the farm behind. I yelled because Amish kids use it too,” Natalie explained. “But usually only on Thursday afternoon – that’s the least busy time of the week for the Amish.”
The woodlot backed up on another cultivated field, this one of alfalfa, with a barbed wire fence separating them. The farm buildings in the distance didn’t look any different from the ones Alicia had seen already, but the two men in the distance... Alicia’s eyesight was better than 20/20. She checked them out: bearded, white shirts, dark trousers and vests, broad-brim straw hats. Amish.
They backtracked through the pines, carpeted with a thick layer of old needles. Alicia looked back at a noise behind her. She thought she saw a dark shadow, but couldn’t be sure – it was gone before she got a good look. A deer? Surely there were no bears in these woods!
Alicia’s inattention cost her – something rolled under her foot. She yelped, overbalanced and went down on her tummy. She was about to pick herself up when she saw a long white skull grinning at her from under a thin covering of pine needles. She screamed, practically levitated back to vertical and backed up until a tree trunk stopped her.
“Alicia! What’s the matter?” Natalie said.
Alicia just pointed.
“Oh! That’s just Old Pete,” Natalie said. “My great grandpa sold his horses to the Amish during World War II – bought a tractor because Grandpa and his brothers all went in the Army. Old Pete was too old to sell – he got turned out to pasture.” She probed around with her toe and exposed a thigh bone, some long rib bones and some vertebrae the size of two fists. “He died when Mom was a kid – she said the kids around here used to sword fight with his ribs.”
“I... wasn’t expecting anything like that,” Alicia said. “Why’d they leave him here?”
“Think of how much trouble it would be to bury a horse,” Natalie said. “Not to mention dragging him through the woods to where you could bury him. He wasn’t causing any trouble here, so they let the wild animals get the benefit of him.”
They walked back westward along the creek, ducked under another fence and continued along the creek through the pasture. Alicia paid careful attention to where she put her feet, and noticed that Stacy was doing the same.
They ended up back below the barn, and made the climb to the flat. They cut through the apple orchard and kitchen garden to the house. Natalie’s grandparents were sitting on the side porch. Her grandmother had made iced tea – it was welcome after their exertion.
“Alicia met Old Pete today, Grandpa,” Kelly said with a wicked grin. “I’m surprised you didn’t hear her scream all the way up here.”
Alicia blushed. “There was something following us in the woods,” she said. “I looked back and tripped. The skull surprised me.”
“No kidding!” Natalie said. “You haven’t spent much time in the country, have you?”
Alicia shook her head. “I grew up on Air Force bases, in places like Okinawa and Korea, Germany and England. Even rural areas there are pretty built up. This seems like the end of the world.”
“Hey, everybody, let’s spend the night with Old Pete,” Stacy said mischievously. “A camp-out.”
But the others vetoed the idea. Some other time maybe, when they were better prepared. Alicia was secretly relieved – this region had been settled nearly 300 yrs ago, but she still wasn’t 100% sure about the bears. Some Indian I am, she thought – that humming noise was generations of her ancestors turning over in their graves.
The girls had their after-supper coffee on the porch. Alicia and Natalie walked down to the road to check the mail box afterward. Across the road, the Yoder family were relaxing after the end of the day’s work.
Both parents were sitting on a bench on their front porch with a boy of 16 or so. Three boys maybe 14, 12 and 10 yrs old and a trim brunette in her late teens were playing with a dog on the lawn. Alicia checked them out.
Amos Yoder was a powerful looking man about 40 yrs old with a full beard but no mustache. He wore a white shirt, dark trousers and vest, a dark jacket without lapels, black boondocker shoes and a low-crowned, broad-brim straw hat. The teenage boy was beardless – he and his little brothers were dressed like their father, except that the two youngest boys were barefoot.
Rachel Yoder had her gray-streaked brown hair done up in a bun. She wore a black bonnet, a black apron over her plain, dark-blue long dress, and black shoes with black cotton stockings. She had no jewelry of any sort. Her daughter was dressed pretty much the same, a brunette about medium height with long wavy hair and a trim shape that her dark green dress couldn’t quite disguise. Her face and hands were tanned from outdoor work. She had taken off her shoes and stockings, barefoot like her brothers – good legs too, if a little pale, from what little Alicia could see as the girl moved.
“The girl is Leah Yoder,” Natalie said. “She’s my age. We played together sometimes when we were little. She has a married sister a few years older.” Natalie paused, then went on. “The Amish marry young. It’s pretty unusual to find one who’s still unmarried at 20 – Leah’s almost an old maid by their standards,” Natalie said. “Unmarried women wear their hair long, married women wear it in a bun. Married Amish men grow beards and don’t cut ‘em – old grandpas have beards like Santa Claus.”
“Why no mustache?” Alicia asked.
“There’s Biblical authority for beards,” Natalie answered. “But mustaches are associated with warriors and soldiers. The Amish are pacifists, so mustaches are forbidden.”
Alicia noticed something else about the Yoder farmhouse – like the Sandler house, it had an LPG tank next to it. “Do they use gas?” she asked, a little surprised.
“Yah, they don’t shun modernity,” Natalie said. “Just connection to the outside world. They use gas to cook, make hot water and heat their homes, just like we do. There are gas-powered refrigerators too, and most Amish people have ‘em. And gas lights with Coleman-type mantles work every bit as well as electric lights.”
Natalie started back up the driveway to the house, with Alicia following. “And in case you’re wondering, they have indoor plumbing too,” she said. “They use the windmills to pump the water.”
They took the mail indoors and came back out onto the porch. Kelly kicked off her flip-flops and went out onto the lawn. She did some stretching and limbering-up exercises – the same kind I do, Alicia thought. She looks like a dancer. Ballet maybe?
Kelly stood at attention, arms at her sides, then went into a martial arts stance. The training kata she did next was every bit as stylized and graceful as a dance. She finished and came back to attention, then relaxed.
“Join me, Alicia?” Kelly invited. “We could spar a little.”
“I’ve never done martial arts,” Alicia said. “I’m a dancer. I thought you were too – you look like one.”
“The way you move, I thought you did karate,” Kelly said. “I’ve had dance training,” she continued. “It helped me with karate – the discipline’s much the same. You could make Black Belt in just a few years if you wanted to. C’mon, I’ll show you the basics.”
Alicia slipped off her flip-flops and joined Kelly on the lawn. The basic moves – advance and retreat, high and low blocks, kicks, blows, and so forth – weren’t much like what she was used to. But they depended on mental discipline, physical conditioning, body awareness, balance and precision. Those were things that Alicia had in abundance.
It was a good workout. The girls did some stretching exercises afterward. Maybe there’s something to this, Alicia thought. I’ll have to look into...
“BANZAI!” Kelly yelled. The girl was unbelievably fast – before Alicia quite knew what was happening, she was on her tummy on the grass, with Kelly sitting on her facing aft.
“Hey!” Alicia yelled. “No fair! You didn’t give me any warning!”
“That’s right,” Kelly said sweetly. “You should’ve been paying attention. It’s called situational awareness.” She grabbed Alicia’s ankles and wrapped a leg around Alicia’s in the figure-four leg lock. “Eww! Grass stains!” she said. “I guess I’ll have to tickle ‘em clean!”
“NOOO! NOT THAT!” Alicia yelled. She struggled, but to no avail – she was had. “Oh SHIT! Hehe! HAHAHA-HAHAHAHA-HAHAHA!” as Kelly’s fingernails flicked and scratched her ticklish soles.
Kelly grabbed Alicia’s right foot with her left hand and made a claw of her right hand. Alicia laughed at the top of her lungs as Kelly raked her nails down the foot, drawing four parallel zig-zag lines and applying just enough pressure to tickle unbearably. Kelly repeated the tickle half a dozen times or so, then did the same to Alicia’s other foot, while wave after wave of helpless laughter poured out.
Kelly spider-walked her nails down Alicia’s arches, scrabbled her nails on both heels while Alicia laughed like a maniac. Alicia laughed her head off as Kelly held back her toes and drew fast, looping figure-eight’s around the balls of both feet. She flicked her nails along the creases in the exact centers of Alicia’s soles as helpless laughter streamed from Alicia. Then Kelly tickled side to side under all ten toes, and Alicia went wild, squirming and bucking and trying desperately to pull her feet away.
“Looks like I found the sweet spot!” Kelly said, and picked up the pace. It was more than Alicia could bear – she lost it and laughed herself breathless.
Kelly dismounted. Alicia rolled over and sat up, breathing hard, and brushed her hair back out of her face. She shuffled her feet to get the tickle off, then inspected a sole. “Still some dirt,” she said. “Nice try though.”
Kelly grinned. “I could try again,” she said hopefully.
“Thanks just the same,” said Alicia. “I’ll use soap and water instead.
“Spoilsport!” Kelly said. “Let’s gang up on Stacy!”
“Let’s not,” Mrs. Sandler said from the back door. “Kelly, this is the second time today. You know how your grandfather feels about tickling.”
“Sorry, Grandma,” Kelly said, instantly contrite.
“It weirds Grandpa out,” Natalie explained. “Mom said he used to raise hell when Uncle Ted tickled her. Mom and her friends went elsewhere or used the syrup house – out of sight, out of mind.”
The old couple still kept farmer’s hours – the habit of a lifetime is hard to break. They were in bed by 9 PM. The girls sat on the porch chatting. After a while, Alicia yawned and stretched, and that got everybody else started. It was only 10 PM, but they had had an active day. They took turns in the shower and headed upstairs to bed.
Alicia changed into her night shirt, then went back downstairs. She walked away from the house toward the field on the east. She looked up at the sky. Air bases were lit up like Christmas in peacetime – only the brightest stars were visible, and only under ideal conditions. Most of East Asia, Europe and New England had enough sky glow to make star-gazing pretty questionable. But there were no lights here, a new moon, and not a cloud in the sky. The stars were diamonds on dark velvet, more of them than she had ever seen. The Milky Way was like a river across the sky.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” Natalie said quietly. “Even out here, they’re not usually this bright.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Alicia confessed. “Thank you for having me, Natalie. Seeing this was worth the trip, all by itself.”
“Look! A shooting star!” Natalie said. “Make a wish!”
No need, thought Alicia. The night was already perfect.
***
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