Exerpts from Vance Bourjaily, “The Amish Farmer,” American Short Story Masterpieces (New York: Dell, 1987), 56-70
*  *  *
     Every story has its relatives. This one is some sort of cousin, in my mind, to a play I saw as a boy, called Rain. In the play, as I remember it, a missionary and a loose woman are trapped in a hotel in the tropics by incessant rain, which becomes her ally in the temptation and seduction of the man. Dawn’s allies were cold, wind, snow, and ice, perhaps, but I don’t want to push the comparison with the old play too far: Dawn, after all, was still quite girlish, and Daniel’s rectitude was of a personal, not a missionary, kind.
     Noel said that as a matter of fact, Dawn first reacted to Dan¬iel with some awe. Noel couldn’t say just when Dawn had started regarding Daniel as either an interesting possibility or an actual attraction. Noel admitted quite abjectly his own stu¬pidity. He and the winter had made Dawn and Daniel the only man and woman in the world.
     My guess is that she was simply, in the beginning, unable to keep from making just a very slight test of Daniel, a little test of herself as well, with no serious motive except curiosity—I’m willing to see it as innocent curiosity, if it wasn’t actually un¬conscious—just to see if he’d respond to her at all. And once he’d responded just a little—was it with a stammer, or a blush, or a clumsy pressing back against a pressing hand?—then it may suddenly have been too late for both of them.
     She had to go on with it. The ice and snow insisted, and her imprisonment. Daniel, I imagine, fought and prayed—and came back for another press of the hand, and one day a hug, and—how much later?—something that was barely the first kiss.
     It would all have been very gradual, very difficult, very ab¬sorbing to the two imaginations, in a rhythm deliberate as sea¬sons changing. I thought of Dawn, passing her winter days that way, moving toward him, guardedly, the excitement allowed to grow very slowly, having to keep the embraces, as they intensi¬fled little by little, out of sight of her child, her husband, the Amish family. The potential lovers were as hemmed in, as hard put to find times of privacy, as any couple could be.
*  *  *
     “I know when it finally happened,” Noel said. It clearly hurt him to tell me, but he had to. “The first time. Dawn and I drove into Yodertown one afternoon to shop and didn’t start back until after dark. It was storming by then, a wet, wild, late-winter storm, with ruts and mud frozen on the surface, soft and treacherous underneath, and the wind howling and freezing and the snow blowing. We got to within about three miles of the place before the windshield wouldn’t clear anymore and I ran off the road and got us stuck in the ditch.
     “I was wearing boots and outdoor clothing, though not really enough of it. Dawn would never dress for winter when we were going somewhere in a heated car. Her shoes were thin and even had heels on them. She was wearing a kind of high-fashion wool cloak that looked romantic as hell, but nothing to keep the wind out. I’d have given her my hat and jacket, but there was no way to beat the shoe problem.
     “We had most of a tank of gas. I might have stayed with her, but Jimmer was home and hungry and the night was scary. The car’d be twice as hard to get out in the morning, when I had to get to school. We decided I’d better go for help. Dawn was to run the motor periodically for heat and to turn on the head¬lights for half a minute out of every five, to show where she was. So I left.
     “God, it was a terrible walk. It kept getting colder. The wind got higher, and the snowfall was the heaviest I’ve ever been out in. I could hardly see. Luckily, it was coming at my back, but I still stumbled and struggled in the bad footing, and once I got so far off the road I ran into barbed-wire fence. It probably took me an hour to go three miles. I was going to phone . . . ” Noel hesitated. “As a matter of fact, Vance, I was going to phone you, because I knew you had a four-wheel-drive truck. I hoped when the storm let up, you could find the place and wouldn’t mind coming after me so we could get Dawn and try to pull the car out.”
     I nodded.
     “When I finally got there, the phone was out. The lights, too. Jimmer was terrifled. I didn’t know what to do. I lit candles and tried to comfort the boy. The stove worked all right, so I fixed him some soup. I remember standing there, stirring it, with my teeth chattering. I couldn’t get warm.
     “I thought of putting Jimmer to bed under blankets, taking Dawn’s winter boots and jacket, and walking back, but I wasn’t too sure I could make it, going against that wind, or that she could, coming back. I decided I was going to have to get Daniel’s help and advice. I should be able to say that some damn warning voice told me not to, but it isn’t so. Whatever’d been happening, they’d concealed it very well.
     “Anyway, I didn’t know if his team of horses and the closed carriage—a sort of van they use in the winter—could go through the weather. I was wondering about that when he knocked at the door. He’d seen the candlelight. He knew the car hadn’t come in. He came to check up, and I explained.
     “When he learned that Dawn was out there alone, Daniel got quite upset. Especially, I suppose, because, not being familiar with cars, he couldn’t believe that she was safe and comfortable.
     “I asked if his team could go out, and he said no.
     “I asked what he thought we should do, and he said, ‘Likely I’ll take tractor to pull out. Sure.’ I was almost shocked. There was this monstrous, big old iron-wheeled tractor in the barn. One of Daniel’s older brothers had bought it years before, when some of the Old Order people argued that a tractor was permis¬sible on the farm so long as it didn’t have rubber tires. Instead, these tractors had lugs, almost spikes, and they tore up the country roads so bad the Secondary Roads Department banned them. Daniel himself didn’t use the tractor, but he’d learned to drive it as a boy—an act of rebellion, I suppose, if not real wickedness. A couple of times a year the older brother would come over and start the thing up and do maintenance on it.
     “I asked if I should ride along. Daniel didn’t even answer. I was in no shape to go out again, anyway. The night was getting worse. Jimmer was there. I gave Daniel Dawn’s boots and things to take along, and out he went in his coat and overalls. They’re not allowed to use buttons. Their clothes are held to¬gether with safety pins. He had a scarf and a black, broad-brimmed hat, knit gloves and galoshes. After a while I heard the big old machine start, and then I heard it lumber past our little house. It didn’t have any lights.”
     Here I paused, as Noel had paused. I looked around the class ¬and seemed to have their attention but it was hard to tell about Katie Jay, my smart student. Her eyes were down and away, studying her tabletop.
     Wouldn’t Daniel’s father and the Amish family (I asked the class) have heard that tractor moving out? They might have taken it for the county snowplow passing on the road.
     The rest is much too easy to imagine: Daniel on his iron tractor seat, laboring against the unfamiliar steering wheel, turning into the wind, chugging through the night. Snow and dark, forces of nature storming in his face, trying to turn him back; the scarf tight, facial skin around his beard getting numb, hands and feet freezing as the slow machine gripped and bumped. But after a time he’d have started to see the faint glimmering of the headlights at long intervals, calling him to her. I don’t know whether in his own mind he was damned before he got there; but the great, clanking, spike-wheeled thing he rode was an engine of sin, no question. And it failed him, going into the ditch itself a hundred yards before he reached the car, so that he finished getting there on foot.
*  *  *
     Imagine Daniel knocking, then, on the deeply frosted window, and Dawn opening the door to what must have looked like a man of ice.
     “Is it Daniel?”
     “Are you all right, missus?”
     “Daniel, get in. Get in. You’ll die out there.”
     “But it’s you worries me.”
     “Please. Get in.”
     He does. The door closes. And they are trapped together in the night. There is a nearly frozen man to thaw. She holds him. She croons to him. She wipes his hair and beard with her cloak. I think that an embrace develops out of this, gets almost violent before, perhaps with a sob, he pulls away. And the wind howls, the snow blows and piles. Dawn waits. Perhaps she touches him, and, with another sob, he hurls himself at her again and is, after how many engagements, received into a warmth like no other.
     That this happened, Noel was quite sure—whatever guilts and indecisions followed, whatever withdrawals and renewals—because of what took place the next night. It was clear and extremely cold, and in the morning there was a curious frozen smudge in the center of one of the panes of glass in their bed¬room window. Jimmer said someone had looked in, very late. Dawn said it was the boy’s imagination. But Noel felt sure that the smudge was made, and others like it as other nights came and went, by the Amish farmer pressing his cheek against the cold glass that separated him from the woman he loved.
     “God, how we’ve fought since then,” Noel said. “I knew. Dawn has a crazy-lady act that goes with having an affair. I’d seen it before. So I accused her. ¬“‘Oh, what fun, Noel darling, who?’
     “Daniel,’ I said, and she almost had hysterics laughing at me. She pulled a handful of her hair around and held it to her chin for a beard, and ran around being Daniel, getting drunk on carrot juice and pinching pumpkins on the fanny. . . . I said to cut it out, that I knew for sure, and she said oh, then she’d run and get Daniel so I could tell him all about it.
     “Yesterday I got home an hour before she expected me. I saw Daniel leave the house. I went in, and Jimmer was napping. Dawn said Daniel was getting the sink unclogged. This morn¬ing I looked, and then I showed her, there’s no way that sink could clog up because the drain’s so big. You couldn’t stop it up with a sweater.
     “So she grabbed a sweater of mine and started stuffing it into the drain, and I told her to go to hell, I was leaving. I got out a luitcase and started to pack it. She grabbed the clothes out of it and ran out the door, screaming and dropping my stuff all over the yard. I was furious. I ran out after her, and there was Dan¬iel, over by the barn, working on that monstrous tractor with a wrench as long as your arm.
     “Dawn ran over and got behind him, pointing at me, and right away Daniel started for me with that wrench. First I couldn’t believe it. Then I ran. I ran to the car with Daniel after me, and he pounded the car with the wrench as I drove away. You can see the dents, Vance. Look.”
*  *  *
     Well (I said to the class), Noel needed his clothes and his books. He was afraid to go back. I said I’d go, and my phone rang.
     “Is Noel there?” It was Dawn.
     “Yes.”
     “Will he talk to me?”
     I asked. Noel shook his head. “I’m sorry,” I said. Tell him Daniel has to see him
     I did. Noel turned pale and whispered, “Oh, my God.”
     I covered the mouthpiece and said, “Noel, I don’t know the man, but I’ll bet you anything he wants to beg your pardon.”  “Ask Dawn,” Noel said, and I did.
     “Daniel’s in an agony of shame,” Dawn said. “I think he wants to get down on his knees to Noel.”
     I passed that along. “She’s such a liar,” Noel said, but he agreed to a meeting with Daniel. I went too. It took place in a local filling station, owned by a backslid uncle of Daniel’s. The young farmer was pretty close to tears, if not quite on his knees. He wanted Noel to forgive him and to pray for him, but afterward Noel still felt wary about going for his stuff. I went, after all, and saw Dawn again.
     Her appearance was strained—we none of us come out of the winters here looking terrific—but her manner was curiously relaxed. I found her, this time, easy to talk to. She seemed to be waiting, without any great anxiety, to see what would happen. None of the Amish family was in sight when I drove in, nor were they when I drove out again.
     Noel graduated and left eight years ago. But Dawn and Jimmer are still in Indiana, as far as I know, living between Gary and Michigan City, by the shore of the big lake. They went there with Daniel. He gave it all up, his God, his inheritance, his family, his community. He’s working up there as a truck driver, I understand
*  *  *
     Again I looked at Katie Jay. I really wanted to hear her get going on Dawn Butler. I expected a strong, funny attack. This was because Katie Jay had once explained to me, when we were speaking about a very cool man-woman piece she’d written, that sex was something she could not take seriously. When she was fifteen, Katie Jay said, and had her first boyfriend, her mother had simply put an extra pillow on the bed. That was all sex meant to slim-necked, caustic Katie Jay, with her shiny blond head and sharp tongue: the essence of no big deal.
     When she had nothing to say, I asked my final question: “Is there any way this story could be written as a serious tragedy?” Then I answered myself: Yes, again as a function of choosing a particular point of view. Recently, I explained, I have come to know a very old Amish farmer, a fine, thoughtful man in his seventies. He is, although he interests himself a little in worldly matters, essentially and attractively an innocent man, if not na¬ive. His name is Aaron, and I can admire if not quite envy him.
     He has lived that life structured for him by fanatical Dutch peasants three centuries ago, and has been fulfilled by it.
     “Suppose,” I said, “we think of Daniel’s father as a man like Aaron, which he must have been. A man who, if only because of his years, is aware before the rest, before Daniel even, of what might happen, yet too appalled to think it really will. He is a man who can truly and simply use a word like Jezebel and feel the damnation in it. And he’s a patriarch, waiting to be consulted and obeyed, but he will hesitate a long time, too long, to acknowledge so great a sin as actual. Suppose we saw through Aaron’s eyes not just the loss, day by day, of his finest son, but the way in which it foretells the whole structure break¬ing down, the wearing away of order in the world—wouldn’t that point of view give you a chance to build some tragic power?”
     The class couldn’t disagree, because I wouldn’t let them. It was one of those days when I felt like having the last word, and it was time to dismiss them anyway. But as they went out, free and clamorous, Katie Jay was still sitting as she had been, not jumping up in her usual way to cry out sharply to her friends, proclaim where they were to go to have a beer. She sat there, uncharacteristically still, but finally she did look up at me.
     I went around the table to her and smiled. Katie Jay’s hand moved up and took my arm above the elbow, and the grip, between thumb and forefinger, reminded me of another’s grip, ten years before, on my wrist.
     “Yes, Katie?”
     She continued looking at me for a moment. Then her eyes went away, her face turned back toward the table, and she re¬leased my arm.
     “Katie Jay?”
     She shook her head. She gathered up her books and stood. I moved aside, concerned, confused, a little cross, and watched her walk to the door of the classroom where she turned back to look at me again.
     “I need him,” Katie Jay said, and there was nothing cool, nothing detached, nothing even very smart about her voice. “Oh, I need that Amish farmer. Don’t you see?”