by Tamar Myers
I frowned. “I remember, dear. You were about to drill a hole in my roof with that oversize head of yours.”
My tone was not unkind, and anyway, Ivan laughed. “It is kind of big. My mama says I owe her one. But like I was going to say, Miss Yoder, I’d check out that blue car if I were you.”
“What was the model?”
“Beats me.”
“But you’re a chauffeur, for crying out loud.”
“Yeah, but I wasn’t paying attention to what kind of car, only that it disappeared. The blue part I couldn’t help noticing, but I’m not so good at my colors, so I could be wrong.”
“You’re colorblind?”
“To a degree. I can’t distinguish blue from some shades of purple, and I can’t tell aquamarine. But it had blue in it—that much I can tell.”
I nodded. Mama had been colorblind. Most folks think it’s only a man’s disorder, and indeed, there are twenty color-blind men for every color-blind woman, but there are plenty of the latter—over a million in this country alone. At any rate, I knew that the most common form of the condition is not the inability to see color at all, but the inability to see red and green in certain combinations.
“Great,” I said. “Now all I have to do is find a bluish car that stopped in the dip just after eight in the morning. Should be a piece of cake.”
“If you let me out, I could help.”
“I wish I could, but I don’t have the authority. I’m not a real policewoman.”
“That’s a shame, if you ask me, because you’d make a damn good one.”
So he was gay and behind bars, and I was happily engaged. I still blushed.
“Thanks. And thanks for your help. Well—sorry to have to leave you here, but I have to go.”
“Off to slay the dragon?”
“Not this one. This one I’m going to visit in her lair.”
24
A fuming Freni can be a fearsome thing. She practically flew at me, like a bantam hen, flapping her stubby arms and squawking something unintelligible.
“English, please, dear.”
“Yah, I give you the English all right. This Alison, she drives me pecans.”
“You mean nuts.”
“Yah, that is what I said. Lipstick, Magdalena! Now my neighbor will never speak to you.”
“She put lipstick on your neighbor?”
“Not the mother, the girls. Sarah and Rebecca.”
I sucked in my breath sharply. “Sorry, I didn’t know.” Freni continued to flap her arms. She’s much more stout than Elspeth, but one of these days, if my kinswoman is wearing her black travel bonnet with the big ruffles, and the wind is just right, she’s going to achieve liftoff I just hope it doesn’t happen during turkey season.
“Bright red lipstick, Magdalena. The little ones look like harlots, yah?”
“So that’s the real reason she didn’t go to the Amish school this morning. Well, don’t you worry, Freni. I may spare the rod, but I won’t spoil the child. As soon as things return to normal I’ll ground her. And dock her allowance if you want. When I get through with her, Alison will rue the day she rouged those little girls’ lips.”
“Ach! She is a good girl, Magdalena.”
“But you just said—”
“I was vending, yah?”
“You mean venting?”
“That’s what I said. Now I feel better. So, you will not be too hard on her, yah?”
“I reserve the right to play it by ear—an unpierced ear, I might add.”
Half the things I say to Freni go right over her head, and it’s not just because I’m so much taller. She stared at me through bottle-thick glasses dusted with flour. “Magdalena, must you always speak in riddles?”
“Was Jacob Amman Amish?” The answer is yes, by the way. He was, in fact, the very first of that frith.
Freni stared at me, a mixture of horror and fascination on her pudgy face. “Magdalena, this you do not know?”
“Of course I know it. I was just joking. Look, can we go inside, maybe have a cup of tea or something?”
“Yah, yah, come in. Barbara,” she said, referring to the daughter-in-law who is the bane of her existence, “has taken the triplets over to visit Esther Gingerich. And Mose and Jonathan are taking the last of the apples to the press.”
That settled it. I followed the stout woman into her immaculate kitchen, give or take a little flour on the floor, and had a cup of milky tea with plenty of sugar, and the best molasses cookies I’ve ever eaten. The secret of any good cookie, as Freni will tell you, is whether or not it can bend at a forty-five-degree angle without breaking. Some of her best efforts can be folded in half and still not snap.
It took Freni until I was halfway through my second cookie to notice. She grabbed my left hand. “Magdalena, what is this?”
I jerked away. “It’s nothing.”
Freni shook her head. “Ach, so bawdy.”
“I think you mean gaudy, and it’s my engagement ring.”
“To Dr. Rosen?”
“No, to the man in the moon. Of course it’s to Gabe.” Freni feigned interest in the wood grain pattern of her kitchen table. This lasted all of five seconds.
“You think he will convert?”
“You know he won’t—not in the foreseeable future.”
“So, Magdalena, you do not think it is wrong, this unequal joking?”
“I can’t help it if I have a better sense of humor than you, dear.”
“No, not joke like funny, ha-ha, but joke like in egg, only not the same.”
“Now I’m afraid I’m totally in the dark.”
“The ox and the ass,” she cried in frustration.
“Ah, you mean ‘yoke.’ ” The image of a believer and a nonbeliever being unequally yoked, like an ox and ass together to a plowshare, is popular among some preachers. It is based on 2 Corinthians 6:14. Just which one the Christian is supposed to be, the ass or the ox, is never specified, since this Scripture passage mentions yokes but no farm animals.
“Magdalena, what would your mama say?”
“Leave her out of it. She’s been dead almost twelve years.”
“She would roll over in her grave, that is what.” Mama gets more exercise dead than she ever did alive. No doubt she is the fittest soul in Heaven, no small thanks to me. Susannah was always Mama’s favorite. The fact that my sister drinks upon occasion, smoked in the past (and more than just cigarettes, I might add), never goes to church, has not only been divorced, but remarried, pales in comparison to my sin of inadvertent adultery, and now my desire to marry a man of the Jewish faith.
“Freni, we’ve been over this a million times. Jesus was Jewish; so were his parents; so were all twelve of his disciples.”
“Yah, maybe. But they didn’t have rings like that.”
I looked down at the ring, which should have filled me with nothing but pride. Maybe that was it—pride. This sin is the perennial biggie among folks of my religious persuasion, many of whom, like me, are proud of their humility. Freni was afraid that I would be caught up in the race for material possessions. And since I would be unequally yoked with a Jewish mate—I’d be the ass, and he the ox—there would be no one of my background to put a stop to this. Except, of course, for her.
“Do you honestly think I should ask Gabe if he wouldn’t mind if I traded this in for a less ostentatious model?” After all, I had traded in my sinfully red BMW for the more Christian Toyota Camry, so I was quite capable of downsizing.
“Magdalena, how much do you think a ring like that costs?”
“I honestly don’t know. Maybe twenty thousand.”
Freni gasped so hard it sucked the flour off her lenses. “Dollars?”
“Well, that’s what Susannah thinks.”
“And how much food can twenty thousand dollars buy?”
“Like for the starving children in India? Or is it Africa now?” I grew up on stories of children starving in Third World countries The sometimes morbid
accounts were intended to make me eat my lima beans, not my favorite vegetable. The one time I suggested Mama package up my stone-cold beans and send them to some more deserving child, she made me eat soap for dessert. After I finished the beans.
My elderly kinswoman nodded. “Or even in America, yah?”
I grabbed another cookie just to be contrary. Why is it that whenever something spectacular happens in my life, somebody always has to object? If I gave away everything that I had, broke my engagement to Gabe, and did nothing but charitable works for the rest of my life, someone, somewhere, would still find reason to criticize me. “There goes Magdalena Yoder, who thinks she’s a saint.” The intonation I heard in my head was Lodema Schrock’s, but it could have been anybody’s.
Still, Freni had a point. A smaller ring, with a carat or less of diamonds, would still be lovely, and it wouldn’t be sending anyone the wrong message. Not to mention, I wouldn’t have to worry so much about it becoming a soap catcher or snagging my good stockings. Besides, a sapphire the size of the one I now sported made it impossible to wear gloves, which are a necessity during our cold Hernia winters. A knockout ring would only draw attention to my chapped hands.
That settled it. I would ask the Babester if he wouldn’t mind if I traded down. For now, I wouldn’t mention it to Freni, lest she think she deserved the credit for my enlightenment, and get a big head herself. What kind of friend and cousin would I be if I handed her the sin of pride on a pewter platter (silver is pride-inducing in and of itself)?
“Freni, dear, I need to change the subject. I’m afraid there’s been another death at the inn.”
“Ach, so many!”
“Yes, I know. I feel like I should post a sign that reads STAY HERE AT YOUR OWN PERIL.”
“So, who dies this time?”
“That young cook, Miss Anne Thrope.”
Now that her lenses were clean, I could see Freni’s beady eyes gleam. “Now I get my job back, yah?”
“Freni, for shame! You could at least say something about being sorry.”
“Yah, I’m sorry.” She sounded about as sorry as Susannah did when she borrowed my best sweater and squirted ketchup down the front.
“Not that you seem to care, dear, but she wasn’t murdered.”
“A heart attack,” Freni said, proud of her knowledge. “It kills more women than cancer. I read this in Reader’s Digest.” The aforementioned journal is very popular among the Amish. Because they do not watch television or listen to the radio, in many cases it is their primary source of information about the outside world.
“It wasn’t a heart attack, Freni. It was a snake.”
It is possible for a stout woman with a stubby neck to recoil as fast as any serpent. “Snake?”
“A twenty-five-foot, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound python—that’s a kind of snake. Anyway, it squeezed all the air out of her.”
“Magdalena, have you been drinking again?”
“That was only once,” I wailed. “How was I to know what a mimosa was?”
“There is not such a snake in Hernia. Little garter snakes, yah, and sometimes in the woods, rattlesnakes.” “It was the colonel’s pet. He brought it with him.”
“Into the house?”
“Apparently it took all three of them to carry it in.”
“Where is this snake now?”
“I wish I knew. Somewhere loose in the inn. Ivan and Miss Thrope even pretended to be married once when I caught them alone in a room. Turns out they were wrestling with the snake—trying to subdue it. But it got away.”
She shuddered. “So now I quit again.”
“Freni, dear, there isn’t going to be anyone to cook for until someone finds that snake—I’m sure not going to do it myself—and removes it.”
“Who does such a thing?”
“I wish I knew. A pest extermination company, I guess I came straight over here from the jail, where I learned about this from the chauffeur.”
The precursor to a smile tugged at the right corner of her mouth. “So you come to me because I am like your mama, yah?”
The truth is Freni was more like a mother to me than my own had ever been. But not having been raised by the ideal mother, I didn’t have the graciousness to tell my surrogate mother that yes, I had come seeking comfort and succor. And especially warm molasses cookies “My mother was as skinny as a clothesline, and her nose was bigger than mine.”
“Yah,” Freni said. It was, after all, pointless to argue with the truth. “And she had a temper like Elspeth Miller.”
“Now that’s going too far!”
“This morning,” Freni said, “I go to the feed store to get some mash for my pullets I must get there early so Mose and Jonathan can use the wagon for the apples later, yah? There is a man from the water company who says there is maybe a water leak someplace outside, and can he take look. Elspeth she turns white, and then she grabs a broom and chases him all the way to his car.”
“At least she didn’t use a pitchfork, like she did once on me.”
Freni nodded. “Yah, your mama, she would have used the pitchfork.”
That was enough time spent going down memory lane. “Well, dear, I should be going.” I snatched one last cookie and stood. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to let me spend the night—if that horrible creature isn’t caught by then?”
“You do not want to spend it with the doctor?” she asked slyly.
“Freni!”
“Yah, sure you can spend the night.”
That was the answer I’d counted on. Freni’s womb had only yielded up one child, Jonathan. But even with the triplets plus Alison, there was room, thanks to the Amish custom of building large houses. On a rotational basis Freni and Mose were expected to host the entire congregation for Sunday services in the downstairs public rooms. Upstairs there were plenty of bedrooms, most of which got used only when daughter-in-law Barbara’s family visited from Iowa. Eventually the elder Hostetlers planned to retire to a smaller, adjoining residence called the Grossdawdy house, but for now there was no need to do that.
“Thanks, Freni, you’re a peach.” To show my gratitude—and yes, partly to annoy her—I defied tradition and gave her a peck on the cheek.
“Ach!” she squawked and waved her stubby arms to fend off any more unseemly behavior.
“There is where I came in,” I cried, and then I skedaddled.
There is a public phone just outside Sam Yoder’s Corner Market. It is used primarily by local Amish, who call long-distance relatives at other public phone booths. Due to the fact that the parties called are generally out of town, there is little need for a directory. This is fortunate, because the phone books always disappear the weekend of high school graduation and are not replaced until after Labor Day. This year, although it was already mid-September, the black protective cover was empty. That’s only one of the reasons I ducked into Sam’s.
He smiled when he saw me. “So you decided the horizontal hootchy-kootchy with a cousin wasn’t such a bad idea.”
“Not if you were the second last man in the world.”
“And who would have the honor of being the last—ah, your nemesis, good old Melvin. Well, at least I’m not on the bottom. And if I’m not what brings you here, what does?”
“Sam, dear, what color is your car?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your automobile. Vroom, vroom. What color is it?”
“Tan, in my opinion, but the official name is something like Wheat Dust, or Wheat Sheaves. Why?”
“Just taking a poll, dear. What color is Dorothy’s?”
“Red. But a purple red, not a sinful red like your BMW.”
“Was. I sold it, remember?”
“Yeah. What’s with the poll?”
“You know what color Wanda Hemphopple drives?” “Haven’t the slightest. Magdalena, what are you up to now?”
“Oh, just some more of my foolish shenanigans. You know how I am.”
“A hell of a lot
more interesting than my Dorothy.”
“Sam, please don’t say that word around me.”
“The D word?”
“No, the h word. You know how I feel about swearing.”
“Always a prude, but that’s part of your charm too.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. I need to use your phone book. I have to call an exterminator.”
“Bats in the belfry?”
“Snakes in the cellar,” I said, just for the joy of alliteration. “Although actually it’s a twenty-five-foot python and it could be anywhere.”
“Magdalena, you flatter me.”
I felt my face turn the color of Freni’s pickled beets. “Sam!”
He handed me the Bedford phone book, which contains both white and yellow pages. “You’re kidding about the snake, right?”
“I wish I was. You wouldn’t have any recommendations on who to call, would you?”
“Come on, Magdalena, a twenty-five-foot snake?”
“It was Colonel Custard’s pet.” I flipped through pages. “How about Dandy Dan’s? Says here he’ll exterminate anything.”
Sam shrugged. “Never heard of him, but I wonder if he’d be willing to exterminate Dorothy’s mom. All it would take is a wooden stake through the heart—or maybe a silver bullet.”
It was a sin for me to derive any pleasure from hearing Sam bad-mouth his mother-in-law, but as the Bible says, I am sinful by nature. Therefore, I was just doing what came naturally. Besides, Sam knew better than to marry for money, and a Methodist at that.
“She driving you crazy again?”
“Speaking of the number twenty-five, you know that Dorothy and I have been planning to go to Europe for our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, right?”
“I believe you’ve mentioned that.”
“Adele thinks she and Larry have the right to come along.”
“Because they’re paying for it?”
“Details, details. They offered, and they didn’t say anything about coming along until after we accepted. Three weeks, Magdalena. Three weeks of traipsing through ruins with a woman who makes them all look young by comparison.”