The Crepes of Wrath

by Tamar Myers

  “If you’ll excuse me, dear, I’m having a private conversation.”

  “This is important, Miss Yoder.”

  “But so are good manners, dear. Now go back out and try knocking.”

  She flounced impatiently to the door, and the second it stopped swinging, she knocked.

  “Who is it?” I called pleasantly.

  “It’s me.”

  “Me who?”

  “You know. Gingko.”

  “I’m busy, Miss Biloba. You’ll have to try me later.”

  “Later when? And the name’s Murray, not Biloba. Gingko Murray.”

  “Right. Uh, I think I still have a few minutes available Thursday afternoon. How about between four and four-eleven? That suit you, Ginger?”

  She pushed her way back in again. “Now who’s being rude?” she demanded.

  I slapped a hand to my breast in mock astonishment. “Well, certainly not me.”

  Freni nodded. “Yah, but you are, Magdalena. So maybe you won’t listen to your mama, or to me, but what would your friend Gabe say if he knew you were rude to the English?”

  “I am anything but rude.” I grabbed one of Gingko’s slender wrists. “You want to talk? We’ll talk.” I pulled her to the door. “And just to show you that I am a generous and considerate hostess”—I grabbed a wicker basket from the counter beside the door—“I’m going to let you help me gather eggs.”

  Gingko’s eyes widened to the size of omelets. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  She trotted eagerly behind me to the hen house.

  “That one,” I said, pointing to my favorite hen, “is Pertelote. No one touches her eggs but me. But that big one there”—I indicated a Rhode Island red—” is Mandy. You get to collect her egg.”

  Gingko grinned. “Awesome. How do I do it?”

  “It’s really quite simple. You lift her with one hand, and take the eggs with the other.”

  “Does Mandy bite?”

  “Hens don’t bite, dear, they peck. Now go on.”

  Gingko was a stubborn girl. “Does Mandy peck?”

  Alas. Lying then would have been every bit as much a sin as King David sending Uriah out to battle so he could sleep with Bathsheba. Not that I had designs on sleeping with Mandy, mind you, but you get my point. Despite her pretty looks, Mandy is as mean as a junkyard dog and would just as soon peck you as eat. For weeks I’d been threatening to send her to the stew pot. In fact, the last couple of days I hadn’t even bothered to collect from her.

  “All hens peck, dear,” I said peevishly.

  Perhaps Gingko didn’t hear me. She glided over to the row of wooden nesting boxes and began cooing in her high-pitched childlike voice.

  “They’re not pigeons, dear.”

  “Oooooo. You’re just the sweetest little thing.”

  Rhode Island reds are not little. If they got any larger, you could saddle them, and only a hungry fox would find them cute. But Mandy didn’t seem to mind Gingko’s silly observation. She sat there just as calmly as could be.

  “Maybe she’s dead,” I said hopefully. While I certainly wouldn’t eat a hen that had expired from natural causes, for the chubby carnivores, Keith and Honey Bunch, she might be just the ticket.

  “Don’t be rude, Miss Yoder, she can hear you.”

  “So?”

  “You’ll hurt her feelings.”

  “She’s a chicken, for crying out loud! She doesn’t have feelings.”

  Gingko gasped softly. “Every living creature has feelings.”

  “Some feelings! Chickens are cannibals, you know. We ate her mother, Elizabeth, Sunday before last, and when we threw the viscera into the chicken yard, Mandy ate more than her share.”

  “You ate Mandy’s mother?”

  “She was a mite tough, but we stewed her for dumplings.”

  Gingko had turned the color of chicken droppings and she was shaking like an aspen. “It just so happens that Mandy and I were friends in a past life.”

  “You were a chicken?”

  “Of course not. I was Cleopatra and Mandy was Ahmontut, my wine taster.”

  “So how did she end up as chicken?”

  “Ahmontut was a he, not a she. Miss Yoder, do you want to hear this story or not?”

  “Do tell.” My eyes were rolling like pinwheels in a stiff breeze.

  I gathered while Gingko gabbed. “Well,” she said and, to my utter amazement, actually picked up mean old Mandy and cradled her in alabaster arms, “Ahmontut sold me out to that horrible brother of mine, and was about to let me be poisoned, when there was a mix-up of wines, thanks to an addled old slave, and Ahmontut drank from the wrong cup.” She sighed as she gently fingered Mandy’s comb. “I’ve had five lives since then, but this is Ahmontut’s first reincarnation. Anyway, he—I mean she—is very sorry about what happened.”

  “Certainly one of us is.” I tried not to yawn. Hen houses are not the most hygienic of environments, and I didn’t want a mite-infested feather floating into my gaping maw.

  “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “It is not my place to pass judgment, dear. Now grab those three eggs while you have a chance. I’ve already collected from ten hens, and you have yet to get a single egg in your basket.”

  “Miss Yoder, please reconsider. Mandy really wants to hatch some chicks. She’s convinced that being a good mother is the only way she can work herself up to the next level.”

  “No offense, Miss Biloba, but that’s utter nonsense.”

  “Please, Miss Yoder. Mandy promises to be good from now on. She’ll never peck at you again, if you let her raise this one batch.”

  “That’s clutch, dear.”

  “Please.”

  I sighed. “Okay. I’ve been needing some new young layers anyway—although normally Pertelote gets the honors. But if she pecks at me even once after this, she’s fricassee.”

  Gingko murmured something into Mandy’s ear hole—chickens don’t have external ears, by the way—and then turned her face to me and smiled. “You’ve got a deal, Miss Yoder.”

  I collected the last egg from Abigail, a hen with very little personality. Surely in her past life she had been nothing more than a mushroom.

  “Okay, dear, we’re all done here. Put the hen back, and let’s get going.”

  “Don’t you want to hear what it is I wanted to speak to you about?”

  Frankly, I had quite forgotten what I was doing in a chicken coop in the middle of the day. Egg gathering is something I generally do in the evening.

  “I’m all ears, dear,” I said, and chuckled.

  Gingko put Mandy gently back into the next box and straightened. She spoke to me as she brushed chicken poop from her cheerful yellow skirt.

  “I had another vision involving you.”

  “Did it have to do with my next life? I want to come back as Prince William’s oldest daughter. I want to be the Queen of England in my own right.” I was, of course, just pulling her leg. I don’t believe in reincarnation. We are born once, saved once, and that’s all there is to it. If that were not the case, things could get mighty confusing for the Almighty. What would happen at the rapture, for instance, if I was a rooster? Then who would get my mansion in the sky?

  “It had to do with this life, Miss Yoder. Actually it had to do with your death.”

  22

  I sucked in enough feathers to stuff a pillow. “My death?”

  She nodded vigorously. “I was washing my face, you see—water is a powerful transmitter—when I saw you, lying dead in a cave.”

  I laughed with relief. “Well, then it wasn’t me! I don’t do caves—not since a school picnic in the sixth grade. We went up to some state park and there was a little cave there, and Jimmy Blough convinced me to play Huck Finn and Indian Joe. I forget who was supposed to be who, but as soon as we got back far enough in the cave that it got dark, Jimmy Blough kissed me and tried to make me touch his—well, let’s just say, when we visited the Bedford fire
department the next week, he still wasn’t able to slide down the pole.”

  Her large green eyes regarded me earnestly. “What I have to say is serious, Miss Yoder. In my vision you weren’t playing post office, you were dead. I hate to have to tell you this, but I’ve had these death visions six times before, and every time but one, they’ve come true. In fact, I was having a vision that John Lennon died the very moment the announcer came on the radio to say he’d been shot.”

  “But that’s impossible. You probably weren’t even born then. At best, you would have been only a little girl.”

  “I was seven.”

  “Seven years old?” I asked in surprise. “As old as that?”

  “Seven months.”

  I bit my tongue. It has been pierced so many times that I can no longer effectively lick an ice cream cone. Indeed, if I could stand the heat, my tongue would make an excellent pasta strainer.

  “Miss Yoder, you must listen to me. You’re in great danger.”

  I set my basket of eggs on the straw-strewn floor. “Okay, let’s just pretend for a minute that your visions really mean something.”

  “They do!”

  “Please, dear, I’m being very generous as it is. Now back to what I was about to say: If what you saw in your vision comes true, how will I die? Surely I won’t be groped to death.” I chuckled pleasantly.

  She tossed her head and the dandelion-studded braid whipped across her back, knocking off a flower or two. Clearly we did not share the same sense of humor.

  “I heard an explosion,” she said. “The walls of the cave came tumbling in. Maybe you were crushed to death.”

  The sound of clucking chickens in the yard alerted me to the fact that we had visitors. Either that, or several of the hens needed to come in and lay. If the latter were true, the poor dears were just going to have to hold their eggs in, because I wasn’t quite through with the psychic nymph.

  “Maybe?” I asked. “That’s all you can say?”

  “I told you before, Miss Yoder, that my visions are more like impressions than photographs.”

  “So you did. But now—still pretending, of course—you said that one of your six death visions did not come true. Why was that?”

  She shrugged, losing a few more blossoms. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because it was my own death I saw. It could even be a past death I don’t consciously remember.”

  “Good excuse,” I mumbled just as the chubby carnivores, Keith and Honey Bunch, pushed their way through the narrow opening of the coop. Once inside they fluffed out to twice their doorway volume.

  “Oh my,” Honey gasped when she saw me standing next to the basket. “You’ve already gathered the eggs.” She sounded genuinely disappointed.

  “Miss Yoder,” Keith said, “we paid extra for the privilege, remember?”

  “So you did. I’d quite forgotten. Tell you what, for just a onetime fee of fifty dollars, I’ll let the two of you rake up this old straw and pile it behind the barn. There’s already a pile there which you need to first spread around in the garden. Make sure to get between the rows of green beans. I’ve been having a lot of problems with weeds there this year.”

  “Wouldn’t it be simpler to just take this straw straight to the garden?” Gingko asked. No doubt about it, she wanted to show me up in front of the Bunches.

  I gave the clever little clairvoyant a smug smile. “Chicken manure is very strong, dear. If they put this stuff on the garden, it would burn those beans right to the ground.”

  “Oh,” was all she could say.

  I smiled graciously at Mr. and Mrs. Claus. “Well, just don’t stand there, dears. The rakes are in the tool shed next to the barn, and so is the wheelbarrow. If you look around, you may find some old gloves as well.”

  The cuddly carnivores thanked me profusely, squeezed back through the narrow door, and out into the chicken yard. The chickens clucked louder than ever. That should have tipped me off, I guess, but it didn’t. I will admit to jumping practically out of my brogans when the giantess from Philadelphia stepped into the hen house.

  “Miss Townsend!” I gasped.

  “There you are, Miss Yoder.”

  “As big as life and twice as ugly,” I said and then immediately regretted my remark. Darlene Townsend was bigger than life, and had to stoop inside the coop. And while she may not have been ugly, a face that large needs a nose at least as big as mine to punctuate the landscape.

  “Miss Yoder”—she frowned, apparently just noticing the Hollywood wisp—” what are you doing here?”

  Gingko glared at the newcomer. “Me? I might ask the same thing of you.”

  “This woman is bizarre, Miss Yoder,” Darlene said loudly.

  I stopped myself in mid-nod. “Please tone it down, dear. Too much noise puts the hens off laying.”

  “Miss Yoder,” Gingko said, tugging on my sleeve like a schoolgirl trying to get my attention, “I had a vision about Miss Townsend too. She’s not who she says she is.”

  “You little runt,” Darlene snarled, “you repeat one word of what you told me, and I’ll sue you for slander.”

  Frankly, I was shocked by Miss Townsend’s viciousness. She seemed like a nice enough, if overly big, gal. And wasn’t she supposed to be a teacher at an exclusive girls’ school? Betty Quiring, Hernia’s gym teacher, might pull ears now and then, but she never called anyone names.

  Gingko’s green eyes regarded the giantess calmly. “You’re a lying, cheating fraud.”

  “Me? You’re the one who goes around telling people you’ve had prophetic visions, like you’re some kind of New Age seer. I bet anything you’re on drugs.” Darlene was shouting again, and even the normally laconic Abigail was running around like a chicken with her head cut off. Abby, however, was clucking, something headless chickens rarely do.

  “Ladies, that does it! Out you both go!”

  But they didn’t budge. They just stood there glaring at each other, one staring almost straight up, the other down. It would have been almost funny, except that in a misguided attempt to give one or both of them a gentle shove, I set one of my size elevens carelessly down in the egg basket.

  “Now see what you’ve done!” I wailed.

  So intent was their hatred of each other, they couldn’t be bothered to notice I was standing in an omelet.

  “That does it!” I shouted, adding to Abigail’s agitation, and stomped from the coop, still wearing a basket on my foot. Outside the narrow door I paused and, after just a second’s hesitation, flipped the hook into the eye.

  Perhaps you think it wrong of me to lock the two hotheads in with my hens, but birds forgive rather easily. Besides, Keith and Honey Bunch would soon be back, rakes in hand, wheelbarrow in tow, to liberate my fine, feathered friends.

  Needless to say, I was in a foul mood when I stormed into the kitchen, sans one shoe, and found Freni and my sister Susannah about to engage in fisticuffs. Okay, so perhaps that’s putting it a bit strongly for two women who, between them, claimed almost a thousand years of pacifist inbreeding, but I’m not far off the mark. Freni was wringing her stubby little hands, and Susannah was wringing what appeared to be a dishtowel. They looked like they wanted to wring each other’s necks.

  “Tell her!” Freni ordered me.

  “Tell her what?”

  “She cannot wear such a thing on the TV.”

  “A dishtowel?”

  “Ah, Mags, it’s not a dishtowel. It’s a dress. See?” Susannah stopped ringing the thing, gave it a good flip, and suspended it in front of her. It hung from the middle of her chest to just below the beginnings of her legs.

  “That’s a dress?”

  “It’s a retro-micro-mini.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “They’re in this year.”

  “They are?”

  Susannah nodded vigorously. “Poor sis, haven’t you heard? The age of ‘anything goes’ is over. For the new millennium it’s going to be short all the way. A thousand years of skin is wh
at Rage Magazine is predicting.”

  I shuddered, but in a strange sort of way that was good news. I wear my skirts well below the knee. My bosom is always properly covered, as are my shoulders. But the recent trend of ankle-length skirts—particularly popular among Episcopalian women, I’ve noticed—has made feeling virtuous a difficult task. I’ve had to content myself with the knowledge that skirts that are too long are showy, and therefore worldly.

  “Well?” Freni demanded. “Say something, Magdalena.”

  My private line rang and I picked up gratefully. “Yoder’s House of Pandemonium.”

  “Sorry.” There was just that one word, but I knew it was Gabe.

  “For what?” I asked casually.

  “For pis—making you mad. I know you can take care of yourself. I only worry because I’m fond of you.”

  “That makes two of us, dear.”

  “You’re fond of me?”

  “I’m fond of me. That’s why it’s two.”

  He laughed. Mozart tried to capture the sound and came close.

  “Come on, fess up, Yoder. You’re fond of me too, aren’t you?”

  “Okay, so I’m fond of you.”

  Freni tugged on my sleeve. “Ach, enough of this sugar talk, Magdalena.”

  “That’s sweet talk, dear.” I turned my attention back to Gabe. “Is that all you called to say?”

  “No. I’m glad you asked. I want you to promise me you won’t be doing any spying tonight.”

  “Gabe!”

  “Promise, Magdalena.”

  I wanted to slam the receiver down hard enough to hurt his ear, but I knew he would just call again. If what I said next was a lie, it’s only because I had my back against the wall.

  “I promise,” I said and then slammed the phone.

  “Promise what?” Susannah asked.

  Freni pointed to Susannah’s dress. “She promises that she will not let you wear such a thing.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, she can’t stop me. I’m a grown woman. I can wear anything I like. Besides, Melvin says that if I wear this, it’ll attract more male voters.”