Rae had to bite her tongue to keep from snapping at Joas when he came down to the breakfast table with a cheery, “Gute morgan!” She was almost glad that Nathan had spent the night with Eli Bontrager’s son, Eli, because he would have surely questioned her dour expression. She wasn’t fond of Nathan hanging out at young Eli’s house, when his father was absent. Eli the elder was kindly to her only child, while his wife, Rebekah, always found some fault to report the next day. But Joas had had enough of the daily talk of Nathan’s desire to go to high school with his best friend, Sam McKenny, whose parents were dear friends but more worldly. Joas felt a night spent among godly people like the Bontragers might set his son’s mind right. “But I like school, Dad!” Nathan would always say. “Sam is going to play football, and win a scholarship to law school. I don’t want to miss out on that.” And like always his mother said, “What would it hurt?” To which Joas would recite the same thing his father had said to him, when he had asked to go on to Kendalville High. “You are going to farm the land. You only need an eighth grade education for that.” He had to admit he was weakening, but summer wasn’t over yet.
Joas smiled to himself whenever he thought of his precocious son. It was only yesterday, while birding, that Nathan put his binoculars down, and said with a zealous glint in his eyes, “I want to find more birds than David Kline did!”
“Ja, it is a good bird book.”
