I could have walked Grandfather’s path in the dark or blindfolded and it wouldn’t have made any difference. I knew it as well as I knew the varicose veins on my left leg. The path cuts between two fields, now turned over to alfalfa, on our land, and then rises up a low wooded ridge that separates us from the Hostetlers. On the other side of the ridge the path descends and divides two cornfields. It’s as simple as that.
I suppose I was daydreaming as I walked to Freni’s that day, but like I said, it didn’t really matter. It was too cold for snakes and too warm for ice, although just barely, so I had no need to keep my mind on what my feet were doing. I was free to think about more important things, like, did Billy Dee really have a girlfriend, and was Delbert James really gay, and didn’t it bother Susannah that she was probably headed for hell and eternal torment and damnation?
I had just entered the wooded part when a tree to my immediate right seemed to explode, and my face was showered with wood chips. Then I heard a crack like thunder. I dropped to my hands and knees. Forty- three years of living on a farm, even as a pacifist, have taught me what a rifle sounds like.
Almost immediately the rock-hard path in front of me rose up to meet me in a spray of pebble-hard particles. The second crack rang in my ears as I dropped to my stomach and rolled under a clump of evergreen laurel bushes.
“Hey!” I shouted. “This is a person here, not a deer!”
There came no response, either vocal or mechanical. Besides the whining in my ears, the only sound I could hear came from a flock of crows that had been routed from their rookery and were flying off in the general direction of Hernia, complaining loudly as they went. When distance finally eliminated their disgruntled caws, the only sound I could hear was the faint cackling of my hens back at the coop. Whoever had shot at me was either not moving, or moving with the stealthy silence of a cat on a hardwood floor. Not a twig cracked, or a fallen leaf rustled.
I lay prone, hidden by the laurel bushes, for the better part of an hour. I don’t think fast on my feet, and I’m even slower thinking on my stomach. I had no reason to suspect that whoever had shot at me was still out there, but no reason to think otherwise. The only sensible thing, it seemed, was to lie there and wait it out. Fortunately, Mama’s old wool coat was as warm as Freni’s kitchen on baking day.
But how long was long enough? That, of course, I couldn’t know for sure, although I did have a fairly accurate barometer of my readiness to make a run for it. About every five minutes or so I tried to rouse myself from my hiding place, and each time my heart pounded so wildly it actually hurt my chest, and my arms and legs would buckle out from underneath me, and I’d fall face down in the leaves again. I probably made more noise trying to see if I could run than I would have if I’d actually run, slapping the bushes with a stick as I went. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that if the hunter really thought I was a deer, or was out to get me personally, he or she could have done so easily within the first five minutes.
Just when I was beginning to gather my wits and strength, and maybe, finally, make a run for it, I heard someone coming down the path. I knew right away it was a someone, and not a something, because he or she was whistling. In Pennsylvania, at least, no critters that walk loud enough to be heard on a hard dirt path are capable of whistling, except for human beings.
I froze in a crouching position and kept my eyes on the path. At first it was impossible to tell if the approaching person was male or female, because both sexes essentially sound alike when they whistle. That’s simply because whistling is produced by the mouth alone and has nothing to do with the vocal cords.
Neither could I tell by the footsteps. Perhaps in the days when men routinely weighed more than women, my unsophisticated ear might have been able to detect a difference in tread. Now, however, following the introduction of polyester stretch pants into western culture, it seems to me that women have made significant gains in eradicating this inequality.
Not that the sex of the person approaching was at all germane to my safety. Female fingers are just as capable of pulling gun triggers as male. Probably even more so, since the average woman has a stronger index finger as a result of pushing so many aerosol spray buttons.
But anyway, when the approaching person was still several yards up the path, I could see through the bushes well enough to tell that it was a woman. And an Amish woman at that. I could see clearly the hem of a long blue skirt hanging close to the ground, and a pair of heavy black shoes.
Although the bushes were too thick above me to see anything more, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. The odds of my being shot at by an Amish woman were about the same as the odds of Freni stripping off her clothes and dancing naked on the dining room table for our guests. I said Freni, not Susannah.