As the World Churns by Tamar Myers

decoys!”
         “Yah, the same. I think perhaps the not so good cow has been brought all this way from
North Dakota
so that we do not look so closely at the good cow.”
        This time, I chewed my cud before speaking. “Yes, but this competition is supposed to be at a high level. Surely the Dorfman twins don’t think they can win with an entry that doesn’t meet objective criteria.”
        “Is it possible they do not intend to win, only to sell the cow?”
        “Ha! An interesting theory. But you would think they could find a buyer back home for the buxom bovine.”
        “Not for this baby,” a voice behind me said.
        I whirled, and found myself staring down into the flyaway eyebrows of Harmon Dorfman.
12
        “Howdy-do, Miss Yoder,” Harmon said, and tipped a straw hat.
        He grinned.
        “I’ll let you know when my heart stops racing.”
        “And you must be an aye-mish man,” Harmon said and extended a beefy paw to Mose.
        “Yah, I am Amish.”
        “We have youse in
North Dakota
too. Best-looking farms I ever seen. Same thing here. Tell me, how many bushels of corn do youse get to an acre?”
        “Okay, it’s stopped racing,” I said. “Do you often sneak up on people?”
         “No, ma’am. Of course, I don’t get me much chance, on account of Harry and I don’t get out very much.”
        “I thought your brother was married.”
        “Oh he is, but she run back to her family after two weeks. So far he ain’t seen fit to go after her.”
        “How long has it been?”
        “Five years come July.”
        Mose shook his head in bewilderment. Although he’s had to interact with us English his entire adult life, he still finds our ways strange. Funny, but I used to exclude myself from the category English, coming as I did from a Mennonite family that descended from Amish forebears. But that was then and this is now, as my pseudo-stepdaughter, Alison, says.
        Now that I was no longer of the blood, but the unwanted offspring of a carnival caller-hmm, my biological mama might not have been the caller. She could just as well have been the bearded lady, or the amazing snake woman. What’s more, short of a DNA test, I had no proof who my papa was either. For all I knew, he could have been a count from Liechtenstein who’d done the extracurricular mattress mambo with a housemaid, who then handed me off to a passing carnival. Did that, perchance, make me a countess?
        “Miss Yoder? Miss Yoder! Are you all right?”
        “I’m fine as the bearded lady’s nose hair, and you may call me Countess Yoder-Rosen of Liechtenstein.”
        “Ach,” Mose said. The poor man was, however, used to my flights of fancy.
        “Miss Yoder, if you don’t mind me saying, you’re a hoot.”
        “Owl accept that as a compliment. Tell me, Mr. Dorfman, why have you hauled this unremarkable cow all the way from
North Dakota
?”
        “Because Cindy Sue-that’s her name-ain’t unremarkable, on account of the other one, Cora Beth, is her clone.”
        “Excuse me?”
        “Youse know what a clone is, Miss Yoder, right?”
        “I read newspapers, Mr. Dorfman, as well as the Bible.” A clone! Perhaps that applied to me. Okay, so scientists had yet to clone a human forty-eight years ago-at least not one that we know of-but it was possible the government had been working on it secretly. After all, if we really knew everything that the government has been up to, it would boggle our minds to the point that we’d all go insane.
        And if I was a clone, that would go a long way to explain the feeling I’ve always had that somewhere there is an identical twin just waiting to be reunited with me. But even if scientists could clone the human body, what about the soul? Would the new person have one? If not, would they still be human, or just look like one? And if