by Tamar Myers
“There’s some brown sugar pie in the saver,” Annie called from the front room. “Made it just this morning. Help yourself if you want, and bring me a piece.”
I cut two large slices and scooped them onto chipped dinner plates. Brown sugar pie is my favorite food in the whole world. It would make a dandy late breakfast, and if Annie didn’t want a piece as large as that, lunch as well.
“My, a bit generous with the pie, aren’t we?” Annie asked when I returned.
I put the tea tray on a table between us. “How is cousin Samuel?”
Annie blanched, which made her mustache all the more visible. “Why, you’re even meaner than I thought. As if you didn’t know.”
“Know what?”
I must have sounded as innocent as I was, because Annie believed me. More often than not I am tried, convicted, and hanged simply because my tone of voice may be slightly off. As a consequence I have been accused of breaking every one of the Ten Commandments except the one involving adultery, whereas in reality there is at least one other commandment I have yet to break.
“Well, tongues must not wag in Hernia as much as they do here. I thought everyone in the world knew about Samuel by now. After all, it happened almost thirty years ago.”
I took a big bite of my pie, which tasted as good as it looked. “Not me, and I kept my ear to the ground.”
Her beady eyes scrutinized my ears. “A good soap can take care of that, dear. You sure you didn’t hear anything?”
“Positive. Anyway, back then Mama covered my other ear with her hand.”
Annie sighed. “You may as well hear it now, I guess. Things like that are pretty tame by today’s standards. Besides, those were troubled times. You remember how it was.”
I shook my head. “Mama kept her other hand over my eyes.”
“Ha! Ha! That sounds like your mother, all right. Ha! Ha!”
I’d forgotten that dear Annie could bark like a dog. “Do go on, dear,” I coaxed.
Annie took a dainty sip of her tea and then carefully wiped both her mouth and the cup rim. “It was like this. Some New York hippies—on their way west, they said—asked if they could camp in our pasture. Just for a night or two, mind you.”
“Of course.”
“Well, they ended up staying almost six months, and during that time we were very kind to them.”
“I’m sure.”
“Too kind, even. We gave them milk from our cows, and let them eat all the fresh vegetables they wanted from our garden. They were very excited about that; called them organic.”
I rolled my eyes just to be polite.
“Anyway, they were full of questions about our ways, so we spent a lot of time with them. After all, they were pacifists, and so were we. It was surprising how much we had in common.”
“Free love?” I asked.
“Ach, no! You should be ashamed of yourself, Magdalena Yoder! Still”—the beady eyes brightened— “that’s not to say one can’t learn a thing or two from the English.”
“Tsk, tsk,” I said. Mama had been right to cover my ears.
“Anyway, to make a long story short, Samuel spent too much time with the hippies. Eventually he got sucked into their ways.” Anna began to whisper. “In the end he ran off with them. Just up and left. And me with three children.”
“You don’t say!” And to think I almost left Farmersburg without paying a visit to our dear cousin.
“Yah. My Samuel, always a good Christian man, ran off with those hippies, and I never saw him again.” She paused, and her voice picked up strength. “But I did get a letter once, telling me how happy he was in his new home, and with his new religion.”
“I beg your pardon?”
She nodded. “India. That’s where my Samuel went. A place called Ashram.”
“That’s a thing,” I said, “not a place.”
“What?”
“An ashram is a religious retreat for Hindus. Paul McCartney stayed at my inn once. He told me all about it.”
“Whatever. The point is, my Samuel’s gone.”
“And your children? Did he take them with him?” Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember ever hearing about my Stutzman second cousins.
“Ha! Ha! The children were too little then. Maybe Samuel was ready to be hippy, but he wasn’t ready to change diapers. I got to keep the children. Ha!
“But they’re gone now, of course. All of them. Off to Indiana. How could they be expected to stay in a place where their father had done such a thing? ‘Your father ran off with the hippies,’ the other children used to tease them. ‘Englisher! Englisher!’ Ha! It’s a wonder they turned out normal.”
“A wonder, indeed. But you stayed.”
“Yah, I stayed. And here I am, all alone. Still, I should count my blessings. I have my health, after all, except for this cold.”
“And the farm too,” I added helpfully.
“Ha! Not the farm. Just this house. I sold the farm off years ago. A woman can’t run a farm by herself, you know.”
I decided not to argue and poured myself some tea, taking care to add tons of sugar and gobs of thick cream, like the good Lord intended. “Who did you sell it to?”
“I sold it to my neighbors. I split it in thirds. That third”— she pointed east—“I sold to Christian Yoder. He was Yost Yoder’s father, and the land was a wedding present for his son.
“And that piece there”—she pointed straight ahead—“I sold to Lazarus Gerber, who farmed across the road. Lazarus gave his piece to his son Stayrook.
“Which leaves that piece to the right, which went to Jacob Mast. I expect his son Levi would have inherited it, but he died recently. Now I suppose it will go to Enos, Levi’s younger brother.”
She threw back her head and barked briefly. “Of course, none of that matters now.”
I took a sip of nectar. “You mean because the Amish plan to sell off their farms and leave Farmersburg?” She nodded, the beady eyes suddenly brimming.
I handed her another tissue. “Wouldn’t you go with them?”
“Ach, I’ll be eighty-one this May. How could I move? I was born less than three miles down the road on my parents’ farm, and I’ve lived in Farmersburg County my entire life. No, I think I’ll die right here.” Perhaps I nodded absently. “Magdalena, have you fallen asleep?”
“Did you say before that the Levi Mast who fell from the silo lived there, and the Stayrook Gerber who dug Yost’s grave lives there?” I pointed in the appropriate directions.
“Ach, you Pennsylvania Dutch are a slow lot,” Annie said, not unkindly.
I swallowed a sip of ambrosia and took another bite of pure heaven. “Good neighbors over the years must have been a comfort.”
“Ha! The Masts have always been good enough neighbors, but the Gerbers…” She leaned closer and whispered again. “I don’t have any Gerber blood in me, you know. You either, for that matter. Between you and me, they’re a funny lot.”
“Yes?” I took another long, luscious sip.
“There were eight of those boys—Stayrook was the oldest—and they were wild. Stayrook was a teenager when those hippies were here, and for a while it looked like it was going to be him, not Samuel, who ran off and became a Hindu.”
“You don’t say.” Amish traditionally allow their teenagers a great deal more freedom than the public imagines. This freedom is predicated on the belief that once their wild oats were sowed, the young adults will return humbly to the fold and thereafter toe the line. Usually this plan works. But as teenagers, my Mennonite friends and I would look with envy on the Amish youth, whose parents always seemed to look the other way. Not my parents, of course. Consequently I was deprived of sowing a single wild oat. Corn is the only crop I ever got to harvest.
“Yah, Stayrook Gerber was a wild one, all right. Hanging out with those hippies almost as much as my Samuel did. Ha! But now it’s Samuel who’s a Hindu, and Stayrook the Christian. A very strict and pious man, too.”
; “The salt of the earth,” I said.
“Yah, and a deacon.”
“Really? Well, maybe your Samuel is a gum by now.”
“Ach, gut Himmel! You talk like a sausage.”
I took that as a compliment and made the mistake of offering to wash the tea things. In any other house that would have meant what the words imply, but not so with dear cousin Annie. By the time I got done ironing the used dishtowels and scouring out the tea kettle, I was exhausted, but still hadn’t gotten Annie to divulge anything important. In a stroke of genius, I reached for my purse.
“You know, I saw the devil himself,” Annie said suddenly, sensing I was about to leave.
“Oh?”
She waved me to a kitchen chair. “Of course, he wasn’t wearing a red suit with horns, and he wasn’t carrying a pitchfork either.”
“Of course not. What did he look like?” I asked politely.
“Like Levi Mast.”
“Come again?”
“I saw Levi Mast possessed by the devil.” She said it matter-of-factly, and it gave me chills.
“What do you mean, exactly?”
“I mean I saw Levi Mast climb up on a silo the morning of his wedding and crow like a rooster. Doesn’t that sound possessed to you?”
“Well, I don’t know.” If Aaron and I were to get married, and he crowed on our wedding day, I would take it as a compliment.
“What if he flapped his arms as well?”
“Levi Mast crowed and flapped his arms?”
“Like this,” Annie said. She gave me a mercifully brief reenactment of Levi Mast’s final moments. Whether it was intentional or not, she came across more like a lunatic than a rooster.
I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. “You saw this?”
The beady eyes brightened. “I was taking a walk when I saw it all happen. Just like I showed you. Now what do you think?”
“Well, I’m no expert on possession, but—”
“Ha! That’s what I told Jacob and Catherine. Of course, they didn’t want to hear it. They claim Levi was just fine until the minute he died. But they didn’t see it. I did!”
“And of course you were at the Yoders’ the night Yost drowned, and know exactly what really went on there, right?”
The mustache twitched. “Who told you that?”
“Sarah. She said she came and got you to stay with the children while she and Stayrook searched for Yost. Is that true?”
“Yah. And talk about possession! An Amish man, naked, in a milk vat. Can you imagine that?”
I shook my head. First Levi Mast acting like a rooster, and then Yost Yoder acting like a cow. Now both of them dead. Something was very wrong in Farmersburg, and it looked like it was up to me to get to the bottom of it. As soon as I found a phone to call Aaron, I would swing back over to the Mast place. Jacob and Catherine were undoubtedly in denial, but they were having company, whether they liked it or not.
Chapter Nineteen
Aaron picked up the phone on the first ring.
“Magdalena?”
“Why, Aaron Miller,” I chided him pleasantly, “you should be ashamed of yourself. You’re supposed to answer ‘PennDutch Inn.’ ”
“I was worried,” Aaron said. “Are you all right?”
“Is the Pope Jewish?”
“What?”
“Nothing. I mean, I’m fine.” Of course, I couldn’t explain to Aaron that not only did he light my fire, he mixed my metaphors as well.
“Are you about ready to pack your bags and come home, Magdalena?”
“Any day, Aaron. I just have one or two loose ends to tie up here.”
I could hear Aaron suck in his breath. “What loose ends? Magdalena, shouldn’t you be letting the sheriff handle that?”
“The sheriff is Marvin Stoltzfus, first cousin to our very own Melvin, remember? Besides, I’m not so sure that he isn’t one of the loose ends that need to be tied up.”
“Dammit, Magdalena, you are getting yourself in over your head. As soon as this damn snow lets up, I’m coming out to get you. Even if I have to walk.”
I bade my heart to still. When a Mennonite, even a lapsed one like Aaron, swears—not once, but twice in the same breath—you can be sure some strong emotion has been tapped. It was as clear to me as the drool on Susannah’s pillow that Aaron Miller, my would-be Pooky Bear, felt every bit the way I did. It was official, we were in love.
I’ll confess, I was singing as I drove up the lane to the Mast place. Aaron Daniel Miller loved me, Magdalena Portulaca Yoder, which just went to show you how wrong Mama could be. My being five foot ten and a carpenter’s dream may have delayed the process a little, but it hadn’t placed it out of my reach. And Mama should have known better, because Susannah, who is only an inch shorter than I, and concave rather than flat, had been in love many times while Mama was still alive. Of course, none of Susannah’s experiences could hold a candle to mine. There was only one Aaron Daniel Miller in the world, and he was mine. It would have been a sin not to sing with joy.
I suppose it’s also a sin to carelessly run over men unloading buggies, and that’s what I almost did. Not that it would have been entirely my fault. Jacob Mast barely cleared the hood ornament on my car. How was I supposed to see him doubled over with the weight of a bag of flour? As for his son Enos, it takes a smart and loving son to jump out of the way of a moving motor vehicle. Had I hit his father, he could have gone for help.
“Ach,” Jacob said when he could catch his breath, “for a minute I thought I was going to see my Levi today.”
I picked up the flour for him, and could possibly have picked him up too, had I been faster. The man couldn’t have weighed more than seventy pounds. Enos, on the other hand, was almost tall enough to see his brother Levi up in heaven without having to die. Four hundred years of interbreeding have produced a lot of homogeneous characteristics among my people, but height is not one of them. To the contrary, the stature genes seem to have polarized, even within families, making the passing on of hand-me-downs impractical.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Mast,” I guessed. “It was all my fault. I mean, I should have seen you. Are you okay?”
Jacob brushed the dirt from his coat with hands the size of my thumbs. “Ach, I’ll be fine. I’m just startled.” He peered up at me through bifocals. “You’re a Yoder, yah?”
“Yah. Magdalena Yoder. From Hernia, Pennsylvania. I came here for Yost’s funeral.”
A shadow flicked across his tiny face. “Yah, I saw you at the funeral. It was our second in two weeks. First my Levi, and then Yost. Two terrible accidents, one after the other. Still, God’s name be praised.”
Enos stood mutely by.
“I’m all for praising God, Mr. Mast, but I’m not sure these were accidents. In fact, that’s why I’m here. I’d like to talk to you about your son’s death.”
Lilliputian fingers combed through a graying beard. “There is nothing else to say. Miss Yoder.”
I handed him the bag of flour. “Of course. I’m sorry to have bothered you. Well, maybe I’ll see you later. Like at the next funeral, after the next terrible accident.”
Jacob glanced furtively around, as if there was even a chance some scurrilous scoundrel might be skulking about. “Mother has made an exceptionally good dinner today,” he said loudly. “Would you like to join us?”
I’m only half as dumb as I look. “Yes, that would be very nice.”
“Good. Mother will be happy to have company.”
I followed the little man and the mute giant into the house. Even before I stepped into the mudroom I received confirmation that Mother was indeed a good cook. The huge slice of brown sugar pie and the copious amounts of cream and sugar consumed at Cousin Annie’s were all going to be reassigned retroactively to breakfast. Dinner, the main meal among most Amish, was about to begin with a clean slate.
It didn’t surprise me one whit when Jacob’s wife, Catherine, turned out to be six foot two and their daughter, So
phia, two foot six. Okay, maybe I fudged a foot or two on the latter, but you get the picture. My point is that the family was decidedly lopsided.
A psychiatrist—a guest of mine, mind you—once told me that he thought Amish men were remarkably free of sexual insecurity. I tried explaining to him that Amish men didn’t have sex, but he wasn’t quite convinced. Anyway, this psychiatrist seemed impressed by the fact that among contemporary societies, the Amish are unique in that their men don’t have to prove their masculinity by driving fast cars, going off to war, hunting, yelling obscenities at sporting events, or flicking remote controls. But what amazed this man the most was the number of short Amish men who felt totally comfortable marrying tall Amish women.
“That shows they are comfortable in themselves,” he said. “They don’t need to act macho or dominate in order to prove that they’re real men. In fact, I would hazard a guess that they make superb lovers.”
“Amish men don’t have sex!” I practically screamed at him.
“Then how do you explain their large families?” he asked smugly. “Are those all virgin births?”
The double dose of heresy was too much for me to bear, and I cracked. “Well, maybe the women have sex,” I said, “but the men don’t.” The fact that I had just condemned all Amish mothers as adulteresses was lost on me until much later.
Considering that they were still grieving, the Mast family were remarkably cordial to me. Catherine seemed neither surprised nor upset to see an extra face at her table. She seated me beside the diminutive daughter, who I judged to be about fifteen, and across from the gargantuan Enos, who might have been eighteen. Three older daughters, I’d already been told, had married and left the nest.
“Will your mother be joining us?” I asked politely of Jacob.
He seemed startled. “Ach, Mama passed on to glory ten years ago.”
I kicked myself under the table for having been so stupid. Clearly the mother he’d referred to earlier was Catherine, the mother of his brood.
Fortunately, soon after that the food was passed and I refrained from opening my mouth except to fill it. Unless, of course, I was spoken to.