The Amish, the tour guide said, gave their youngsters time to consider their future. A teenage boy could have the use of a buggy, turn up the brim of his hat and go "sow his wild oats" before making a final decision. Girls, it seemed, didn't get to drive buggies, but their guide hurried over that particular. Eventually an informed decision had to be made: leave or be baptised into the faith, the community and its rigid codes of conduct. Some left for good, more left but were glad to return to the comfort of this familiar, ordered and stable world. The only real sin was to be baptised into the faith, assume the plain black garb and then break the rules. In which case you were shunned. To be shunned was to be totally ostracised. You were made an outcast by the elders, by your community, by your neighbours, by friends and even by your own family.
Ian had to subdue mixed feelings of agitation, anger and something more troubling. He tried to concentrate on the tour guide. She was explaining that an Amish woman might wear a white lace cap. Apart from that she wore the colour white only twice in her lifetime. Once when she got married and once when they put her in a shroud.
"Same thing," George quipped, and got a withering look from the guide. After the regular tour they were free to roam about the compound. They visited the schoolhouse first. Again, Ian had a disturbing sense of deja vu: the wooden desks, the long blackboard and chalk-dust, the tall windows and the high ceiling. It could have been his first schoofroom.
"Did you see this?" George said, and he began to read from a chart on the wall. "They say that they select teachers for their Christian example and not as in public schools for their ability and training. They see a child as future plain person with a soul and not as a citizen with an intellect. They see learning as work not as fun, stress memorisation, and believe truth is revealed in the Bible as opposed to the search for truth. I wonder what they'd say if an oldest son came home and said, `Hi Mom, I'm gay and this is my friend Darwin'!"
Ian wanted to laugh but he felt a rush of bile scald the back of his throat. His legs began to quiver. to steady himself he rested his weight against a wooden school desk. The desks ranked in size, with the smallest nearest the teacher, getting progressively bigger towards the back of the classroom. The next step was out the door.
Before he knew it, Ian was outside being stared at by George. "I thought you were going to faint," George looked worried.
"Let's get out of here."
They followed the main road for a while, passing Amish farms but also a suprising number of regular bungalows with tell-tale electric wires running to the gables and cars standing in the driveways. They began to turn down side roads. The houses thinned out. The high corn crops came to the edges of the road. In the rapid onset of dusk they noticed the yellow glow of kerosene lamps inside the big Pennsylvania Dutch barns. They reached an incline where the road sloped towards a river with trees along its banks. In the deepening gloom, a covered wooden bridge loomed before them.
"Can you stop the car," Ian said.
He opened the passenger door. After the cool, neutral air of the car the evening air was aromatic and dense. He walked towards the bridge but stopped short of its dark raftered interior.
George parked the car and got out. Though there was not a stir of air, a faint ominous rustle came from the cornfields. In the evening quiet he heard the approaching clip-clop of hooves and a buggy appeared, passed without the driver taking any notice and continued up the road.
"It was a really warm summer, I remember, and after work we'd meet at the stone bridge over the local river," Ian's voice floated out of the dusk.
George waited uncertainly. Whatever Ian had to say had been building since they left the schoolhouse, perhaps since the start of this trip. Was the brush off coming? Had they reached the end? And if Ian walked out now, did he have a contingency plan? Was there somebody waiting out there in this wilderness ready to pick him up if George drove away - the dark presence he'd felt like a stranger dogging their movements all day.
"I was seventeen, going on eighteen. Joe was the same age," Ian went on, his voice soft and low. "I was meant to go to college in September. Teacher training. Joe would probably take over the family farm next door to ours when his father died. We'd meet at the bridge or the old schoolhouse in the evenings when the work was done and we'd chat and drink cider and then chat some more. One evening, when we were both a bit tipsy, there was this pause in the conversation. We looked right into each other's eyes in the long, drawn out half-light or a rural dusk and we kissed each other full on the mouth. Man it was something. It was so dangerous but such a thrill."
George guessed that the bad news was on the way. And now he knew the name of the other man. Joe. But he waited for Ian to come out with it.
"Can you remember how you felt when you were coming out?" Ian asked. "How strong it made you feel, and how vulnerable. How honest you felt, and at the same time you had this guilty secret to hide. Do you remember what it was like to feel grown up all of a sudden, but still a child on the inside trembling like jelly? I was the Terminator, lethal and unstoppable, with a better than average body. And I was Dorothy, on her yellow brick road at the start of a fabulous adventure. One part of me screaming to be cautious and the other side wanting only sensual, loving abandon."
George had to grip the weathered timber of the bridge in an effort keep silent. Having found Ian and allowed him so wholeheartedly into his life, he knew that rejection was always inevitable. Love had only one golden rule; the greater the happiness today, the more overwhelming the heartache tomorrow.
"We could have gone away somewhere," Ian's words reached George again, their tone at odds with the misery and panic he felt. "But we didn't know enough. Where to go or why we ought to have gone. We tried to keep low-key, secret. One night a car passed while we were kissing in the shadows. We reckoned we hadn't been spotted. The following night I went to a disco. Joe was there but we kept apart. Not dancing together, not even looking often in each other's direction. Just playing our parts until we could be alone." "A glass came through the air and smashed against the wall above my head. I never imagined I could be the target. There were fights all the time the disco. The joke used to be, you went for a laugh and came back in stitches. I didn't feel singled out. But they were waiting in the car park, a bunch of young fellahs. Heroic with booze. The first punch missed my face but the second caught me in the stomach. I collapsed and felt my ribs crack with the force of the next kick. I tried to save my head by using my arms, and when more kicks came I curled up into a ball and waited for it to pass.`
"Were you badly hurt?" George pressed Ian's arm, a gesture that was as much a comfort to him as it helped to cosset a loved one.
"Nothing the doctors couldn't put back together. That's what I thought, anyhow."
"And Joe?" George asked.
"Joe was one of them."
They walked the length of the timbered bridge together, their footsteps echoing under the cavernous hood.
"Did it go to law?"
"I couldn't do that to Joe, or to myself. And it was implied at home, I'd disgraced my family and myself. I'd corrupted a neighbour. The locals cut me with looks. People I hardly knew whispered behind their hands, others avoided getting into a queue with me at the shops. It hurt. It was awful. But it was Joe I really felt sorry for. He avoided me like the plague. Even though I understood his betrayal."
"I don't get it," George said. "You could have been killed. How could you forgive him?"
"Anyone can buckle under enough pressure. Especially the kind of pressure Joe must have been under. I could forgive him for what he'd done. But not what he'd turned into. I knew I had to escape, but Joe was ready to stay. Bullied, mistrusted, afraid and frozen out, shunned not only by the people he was trying so hard to appease but shunning his own nature too."
"So you came to America?"
"Not right away. There was London, Dublin, and a while in Greece teaching English to foreign students. I found it impossible to settle."
"What became of Joe?" George asked, feeling his throat tighten.
"The last I heard he had a serious drink problem. And some young lad was alleging he'd been molested. Joe was facing a possible jail sentence unless he paid a lot of money. He would probably lose his farm."
"We make our own luck," George said, but it was a spur of the moment remark more than a concrete belief.
"We were two young men who loved each other. Why did people have such a problem with that?"
"That's the way it's always been," George said. "And sometimes we have as many problems ourselves."
The night air was now a pleasant balm and they leaned closer, bowed their heads and kissed. When they turned and walked arm-in-arm again towards the car, it was fully dark. As they sat into their seats the interior light revealed George's bloodshot eyes.
"What's this," Ian asked.
"I was certain you were going to walk out."
"What made you think that?"
"The way you've been all day."
Ian looked at him in disbelief.
"I owe everything I have to you."
"Is that not part of the problem?"
"I meant, the happiness I have."
George gave a quick, instinctive nod of his head. He used the back of his hand to dab the corners of his eyes and turned the key in the ignition. As the engine started his composure returned and he steadied himself at the wheel.
"Where to now?" he asked.
"How about a place where people are completely honest with themselves?"
George's smile was back.
"Somewhere over the rainbow," he said and eased the car into drive.