As the World Churns

by Tamar Myers

  Perhaps even Hernia would be renamed Magdalenaville. Someone could compose a song, create a nonalcoholic drink…I shook myself. There would be time to daydream later. What I had to do now was play it cool, and respond to Ida’s pointed remark that Agnes must be “foidle” because she had wide hips.

  “And I’m not foidle?” I asked.

  “Like da Goblin Desert, yah?”

  “And you,” I raged at Gabe, “you really think I’m crazy?”

  “No—maybe—but in a delightful sort of way.”

  “That does it! Stop the car, Agnes.”

  “But Magdalena, we haven’t gotten anywhere yet.”

  “We’re on the outskirts of Hernia, for crying out loud; this most certainly is somewhere.”

  “Hernia’s too small to have skirts,” Gabe said. I think he was trying to be funny.

  “Agnes! This is my car, and you are my friend, so—Oh my stars, I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “Sick?” My buddy may be large, but her feet are pretty darn quick. Had we not all been strapped in, one or more of us might have shot through the windshield.

  “My hair,” Wanda cried in dismay. “Look what you’ve done, Agnes. It’s about to topple.”

  Sure enough, the infamous Hemphopple tower of vintage vermin was hanging by its last bobby pin. Even a small jolt would now send waves of filthy hair cascading in all directions, quite possibly killing us all with deadly toxins, which would then leak out the vent and spread like a plague across the nation. It wouldn’t be the wrath of God that was ultimately responsible for the devastation, it would be some woman from the 1950s who had a rattail comb and a surfeit of hair spray lying around on a Saturday morning.

  “Everybody out,” I hollered. “I’m about to blow my cookies!”

  Trust me, that’s the fastest way to empty a vehicle. Everyone piled onto the shoulder of the road, including Agnes, who should have known better—everyone that is, except for me. My buddy even left the keys in the ignition, which is exactly what I had been hoping for.

  I made a show of clambering from the backseat, but I slid into the front seat just as smoothly as a key into a greased lock. Then, just like a key is supposed to do, I locked the doors.

  “Hey,” Gabe yelled, “what are you doing?”

  “Chocolate-covered corn and the man in the moon,” I whispered, whilst moving my lips in an exaggerated manner.

  “What? I can’t hear you.”

  “Seventeen blue monkeys are running for president.” I pointed to some vague spot behind him.

  When he turned to look, I mashed the accelerator into the floorboard. The car lurched forward, leaving everyone in the lurch. This unfortunate fact was regrettable, but could not be helped.

  Besides, it wasn’t like I left them in a dangerous situation. Outside of murder, there is very little crime in Hernia. Our worst offender is probably Cynthia Higginsbottom, who is fond of stroking ankles without their owners’ permission. With the Pearlmutters under arrest, my friends and family were safe—except, perhaps, from each other. I, on the other hand, had several metaphorical miles to go before I could sleep.

  Doc’s front door was ajar, permitting a spear of light to bisect his porch. After pausing to pray for a second or two, I pushed it open the rest of the way. I thought I knew what to expect, but boy was I dead wrong. I stood staring, dumbfounded, until she spoke first.

  “Close the door, please dear. It’s getting cold in here.”

  “Yeah, Yoder,” he said. “Were you raised in a barn?”

  “Fancy meeting you here,” I said, having rejected a string of invectives unworthy of a Presbyterian, much less a Mennonite.

  “I knew you’d be back,” he said. “That’s why I took the risk of returning to this dump.”

  “It’s not a dump; it’s quite cozy. You of all people shouldn’t be one to complain.”

  “Skip the lecture and just bring your sister to me.”

  I glared at his mother. “How can you be okay with this? You can’t possibly think you’re somehow helping him.”

  “Shut up,” he said, “and do as I say. That is, unless, you want someone to get hurt.”

  “Hurt? You’ll be ruining her life if you convince her to go with you. You’ll ruin your mother’s life too.”

  “My mother’s life is none of your business.”

  The Good Lord shut the lion’s mouth for Daniel, but it was Mrs. Stoltzfus who shut mine. “It is her business, Melvin,” she said.

  “Mama.” He managed to drag it out into an eight-syllable whine.

  “Shut up, Melvin,” she said. Her voice lacked invective, but not authority.

  “Yes, Mama.”

  Elvina Stoltzfus turned her full attention to me. “Please forgive my boy, Magdalena. It isn’t his fault—the way he behaves, I mean.”

  “You mean because he was kicked in the head by a bull? One he was trying to milk?”

  “I was only nineteen,” the mantis said. Perhaps it was due to his mother’s presence, or perhaps it was due to the lack of starch in his prison clothes, but he did seem almost boylike. He certainly appeared smaller than I remembered.

  Elvina Stoltzfus was in her mid-eighties. Although she’d been flirting with the Grim Reaper for several years, she reacted now with surprising vigor.

  “I have to face it, Magdalena: I’m responsible for the miserable way my son turned out.”

  Miserable? Were my ears deceiving me? For years, I’d been referring to the mantis as miserable, all the while believing I was being unkind. But if his mother thought this, then I’d merely been making an honest observation.

  Melvin’s eyes bulged more than usual, causing his head to wag to and fro like a bobble-head doll. It was a wonder he could maintain his balance.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong, Mama, because I turned out all right.”

  She dismissed her son with the wave of a shriveled hand. “I shut down emotionally after I gave you away, Magdalena. I felt as if my soul had been ripped out of my chest. I had no business marrying anyone then, much less your father.”

  “My father? Forgive me, Elvina, but did that bull kick you as well?”

  She blinked. “You really don’t know?”

  “I know plenty. I know that you Stoltzfuses are as nutty as a pecan pie.”

  “I honestly thought you knew—that they’d told you—and that’s why you treated your brother so bad.”

  “That would be ‘badly,’ dear, if it made any sense. I don’t have a brother, and since my parents have both been dead for over a decade, it’s probably safe to say that I never will have a male sibling.”

  The mantis couldn’t seem to follow these bizarre babblings any better than I could. “Mama, tell her to call Susannah and make her come over so we can get out of here.”

  But Elvina was not in the mood to indulge her son. “Be quiet, Melvin, so I can talk to your sister.”

  That’s when the Devil possessed me lock, stock, and barrel. “Crackers,” I said, and made a circular motion whilst pointing to my head. “Polly wants a cracker.”

  If Elvina was offended by my rude behavior, she didn’t show it. “I was only fifteen when I became pregnant with you. I was too young to get married, and, of course, having an abortion was out of the question. I was a good Mennonite girl; we didn’t get pregnant, and if we did—well, I had no choice but to go away and visit the proverbial aunt in some faraway city. But you see, I couldn’t bear never to see my baby, not to watch her grow up.” She took a deep breath, setting in motion rivulets of tears that coursed down the creases of her face. “Then I remembered your parents, that they’d been married for years and never had children. Fortunately, I had a real aunt who was in on my secret, and she approached your mother, who then talked with your father.”

  “Please excuse me,” I said, “while I wobble over to the couch and lie down.” I arranged my lanky frame over Doc’s much-used loveseat. “Go on, dear, with your utterly fascinating deconstruction of my life.”
/>   “I’m sorry, Magdalena. I really am—for breaking the news, I mean. I always thought you knew.”

  “Ha! If I’d even as much as suspected that there might be a ghost of a chance that your murdering son and I were more closely related than third cousins, I would have jumped from my silo onto a strategically placed pitchfork.”

  She had the temerity to feign shock. “Well! I must say I am surprised that your mother didn’t raise you any better than that.”

  “But her mama wasn’t her mama,” Melvin mewed. “You are.”

  “Hush, boy,” Elvina said sharply. “Magdalena, do you want to hear the rest of the story or not?”

  “Fire away when ready!” I closed my eyes, and put my hands next to my ears, just in case I needed to block out reality at a second’s notice.

  She wasted no time. “You see, the trick was getting the rest of Hernia to believe that it was your mother who’d given birth, not me. For the first four months, we both wore loose clothing. Then about the middle of the fifth month, we left town—not together, of course; your mother and I never got along. At any rate, I returned first, still wearing loose clothes. About a month later she returned with you in her arms. I tell you, Magdalena, the day I first saw you in her arms, I almost died of jealousy.”

  I opened one very skeptical eye. “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that this story is true. Who is my papa?”

  39

  “Why, my husband of course! May poor Siegfried Stanislaus Stoltzfus rest in peace.” She seemed not to remember that her husband had been anything but a peaceful man. In fact, he had such a short fuse that he was known throughout the county as Dynamite Stoltzfus.

  “Ah, but you see, there’s where your tale falls apart. If Dynamite Stoltzfus really was my father, then Melvin and I would be full siblings.”

  “Please don’t call Siegfried by that ugly name. It wasn’t his fault he found everyone else so irritating.”

  “Hmm. There are, in fact, those who might accuse me of having a short—Never mind that. Just look at your son and I; we look nothing alike.”

  “You take after my side of the family, while Melvin takes after your father’s.”

  I sat up, feeling as sick to my stomach as I’d ever felt. “Melvin, have you heard this bizarre story before? And if so, do you believe it?”

  “Of course, Yoder. Do you think I’m an idiot?”

  “I don’t know that your being an idiot has anything to do with this. I just want to know if you’ve been privy to this bit of nonsense. If so, how could you marry your sister’s sister?”

  “You mean Susannah?”

  “Are there more?” I wailed.

  “Yes, she means Susannah,” Elvina said, and shook her head. “That business with the bull was so unfortunate. Did you know that my side of the family—your family—are exceptionally gifted? Your cousin Marilyn has an IQ over 150.”

  “If all this is true,” I said, “is there anyone who can back up your story?”

  “Freni Hostetler.”

  “My Freni Hostetler?”

  “And mine. As you know, she’s my best friend. She was the only one who really knew why I was going away, and for so long. Even Siegfried wasn’t in on it.”

  I remember sitting still for so long that I felt as if Doc’s worn-out loveseat and I were melding. Together we’d become one fossil, causing curious archeologists to postulate that…

  “Earth to Yoder. Come in, Magdalena, before I have you declared legally dead.”

  “Melvin,” Elvina said, and clucked like a pullet whose nest had just been raided. “This is your sister you’re talking to, so be nice.”

  “Oh yeah, my sis. Mama, does this mean she’s not any better than I am?”

  “Go play with your toys, Melvin.”

  “But Mama, I don’t have any toys; you took them all away last year when I married Susannah. Remember?”

  “Then just sit there and be quiet.”

  “I have a better idea,” I said. “Go out in back and chop some firewood; it’s freezing in here.”

  “I ain’t chopping nothing for you, Yoder.”

  “Then do it for Mama.” The word felt dirty in my mouth.

  “Mama, is that what you want?”

  She hesitated briefly. “Why yes, son, it is. Your sister and I need some girl time.”

  “But can’t you do that after we’re someplace safe? At least after she’s called Susannah.”

  “We want to talk about our periods,” I said. “Maybe even our colons and semicolons. Some of these girl things can’t wait.”

  This time Elvina jumped right in, proving to me once and for all that we were indeed next of kin. “Not that it’s any of your business, Melvin, but your sister’s diagram has come loose. If I don’t help her right now, it could result in a dangling modifier.”

  “Maybe even an elliptical clause,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t want that on your conscience, would you, son?”

  “No, Mama.”

  “Good boy.”

  “But before you go, brother dear,” I said not too unpleasantly, “tell me how you escaped from prison and made it back to Hernia. And why you bludgeoned a sweet old man like Doc Shafor. The nutshell version, of course.”

  He snorted with derision. “I snuck out in the laundry, of course, like in the movies. You pay the right person, they don’t always check on the outgoing stuff.”

  “But you’re poorer than a church mouse, for heaven’s sake. The only money you had was your pitiful municipal salary and the allowance I gave you.”

  “You see, Yoder, you don’t know anything about prison life. Payment doesn’t always have to be in cash.”

  “Skip right ahead, dear, and tell me how you managed to make it this far. I know you didn’t walk. You once rented a dolly and had Susannah push you all over the state fair.”

  “You always exaggerate, Yoder; it was the county fair. I was wearing my white buckskin shoes. What would you have me do? Get them muddy? And to answer your stupid question, I just stopped in at a Food Mart and got some self-tanning lotion and dark hair dye, ducked into the men’s room, and presto. Of course the tan took a couple of hours in all. How do you like it?”

  “It ill-becomes you.”

  “I’m not sure what that means, but I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “I knew you would. What about the other guy?”

  “He was a real Hispanic. An illegal. Scared out of his wits too. He did everything I said—well, as much as he understood.”

  “Where is he now?” I gasped. “You didn’t, did you?”

  “Of course I did. I’m not the fool you think I am; I told him to vamoose as soon as it occurred to me to come here to Doc’s.”

  “So you didn’t kill him?”

  One of Melvin’s eyes glared at me, while the other appeared to glance merrily around the room. “I don’t kill people just for fun, Yoder. They have to really tick me off—you get what I mean?”

  “Is that a threat, dear?”

  Elvina slapped her shrunken cheeks in maternal distress. “Children, please!”

  As distressed as I was, I wanted nothing more than to slap Melvin’s cheeks until they were shrunken. Alas, that was neither the Christian, nor the practical, thing to do. I swallowed a piece of my tongue and got back to business.

  “How did you hook up with this guy, and how did you get back here?”

  “Fortune smiled on me, Yoder. It always does. José was standing outside the Food Mart, waiting for somebody—anybody—to come by who might need a worker. He said he’d done this lots of times. And sure enough, along comes this old biddy in a truck pulling a cow trailer. She hired us on the spot. She didn’t ask us any questions, and I didn’t ask her how she managed to get that Holstein up on the trailer by herself. Anyway, when she made that left turn on to Route 12, I nearly crapped my pants—sorry, Mama—and when she turned into your place, I really did.”

  “TMI!”

  “Huh? You calling me nam
es, Yoder?”

  “It means ‘too much information.’ Please, move right along to Doc.”

  “Yeah, well, that man may have had a pet dinosaur when he was a boy, but he’s no man’s fool. Even though I didn’t speak a word to him, he spotted me right off. He froze all up and started walking backwards. So then I did start to say something—like I wasn’t going to hurt him, or some such—and he ran. That’s when I picked up the shovel, chased him down, and gave him a good crack. Crack—ha! That’s actually what it sounded like.”

  “Why you miserable little mantis! If I had a shovel right now—Get behind me, Satan!”

  “Are you blind, as well as stupid? I’m standing right in front of you.”

  “Indeed you are. As is the Devil, who, by the way, is urging me to do you bodily harm.” I took a deep breath, one which hardly felt cleansing. “Back to your sordid story. Did you spend your first night in the woods behind my house?”

  “Yeah. Yoder, you really should install a toilet in that fake outhouse of yours. Hey, how did you know?”

  “You were spotted by an Amish girl.”

  Elvina wrung her hands in the anguish only an inadvertently inhospitable mother can know. “You should have come straight to me, son. I keep a pair of fresh jammies laid out on your side of the bed—just in case.”

  “Again with the TMI!”

  Both of Melvin’s eyes connected with mine for a split second. “Oh get off your high horse, Yoder. We don’t do anything wrong; we only cuddle. There’s nothing wrong with cuddling with your mama. After all, I did spend nine months inside her stomach.”

  “That would explain some things, dear; nine months of gastric juices are bound to have an effect.”

  “Yeah, Mama is pretty smart. Thanks for the compliment, Yoder. That’s the second time you’ve ever said anything nice to me.”