Just Plain Pickled to Death

by Tamar Myers

  I couldn’t believe that even a fake nun would talk like that. It had to be the influence of television. The devil in a box, Mama used to call it.

  “It was a paring knife, not a butcher knife. And it was for self-defense purposes only.”

  “I thought you Mennonites were pacifists,” she said cruelly.

  “But I’m supposed to get married on Saturday,” I wailed. “I can’t afford to get killed!”

  The cubicle door opened. “What the hell—so, I see you’re awake.”

  “Uncle Rudy! Am I ever glad to see you! You wouldn’t believe—”

  “Shut up.” Uncle Rudy waved a small handgun in my general direction.

  “Yes,” I whispered, “I should keep it down. We don’t want Uncle Jonas to know you’re here. How did you find us?”

  Diane Lefcourt brayed like a banshee. It took me a moment to recognize that it was laughter.

  “Shut up, bitch!” Uncle Rudy growled.

  It was a good thing I was sitting, because I would have hit the floor for sure. As it was, the shock gave me a permanent gray streak along my left temple. Fortunately it is a very narrow streak and I am able to blend it in with the rest of my hair.

  “Uncle Rudy!” I gasped.

  His face had turned into a smooth, hard mask. I could no longer recognize the meek little uncle who slept his days away on my parlor settee.

  “Goddamn you, Magdalena.”

  Sometimes I’m as slow as molasses during a January cold snap. “But I thought you were Uncle Jonas. I mean, I thought Uncle Jonas did this to me—conked me on the head and tied me up. Where is Uncle Jonas? And Delores?”

  He snorted. “Trussed up like turkeys one floor below you. Just like you two.”

  “And you’re a pig, Rudy,” Diane said defiantly.

  “I said shut up, bitch!” Uncle Rudy turned and waved the pistol menacingly in front of her face.

  The braying stopped. “Make me!”

  There was the sound of metal hitting flesh. A dull thunk, not unlike when Freni tenderizes flank steak with a stainless-steel mallet. Diane slumped silently in her chair.

  I screamed. I would like to say that I did it to draw attention away from Diane, but the truth is I was horrified. I have never been struck, much less with a pistol. Then again, given the size of my headache, perhaps I had been.

  “You,” I said through gritted teeth, “you killed Auntie Rebecca and Sarah?”

  He turned toward me, waving the bloody pistol. For a second I thought I would be next. But Uncle Rudy has short arms, and I was sitting across the bed. It soon became clear to both of us that he wouldn’t be able to strike me in the face—not without climbing across the bed. Call me a fool, but I didn’t think he had it in him to shoot me head on. Not with me staring him in the eye. Bashing skulls seemed to be his MO.

  “Why?” I cried. “Just tell me why. They were your relatives, for Pete’s sake!”

  “Goddamn you, Magdalena, why couldn’t you mind your own business?”

  “Sarah turned up in a wedding present!” I screamed. “She is my business.”

  He was sweating profusely, and with his free hand ripped his tie loose. “Sarah wasn’t supposed to be involved. She saw something she shouldn’t have. I couldn’t help it. I had to silence her.”

  “By bashing her skull and stuffing her in a barrel of kraut?”

  He wiped his forehead on a sleeve. “I would have buried her, but I didn’t have time. Lucky for me the Millers had a bumper crop of cabbage that year and their root cellar was packed with barrels.”

  “But you killed her!” I was getting hoarse.

  “It was her mother’s fault,” he whined. “She had a religious conversion and needed to cleanse her conscience. She was threatening to tell our little secret. She wanted to get it out in the open, have a full church confession. That sort of thing. And after all those years!”

  “You’re talking about Sarah being your daughter, aren’t you?” Suddenly it all made sense.

  The slits opened just wide enough for me to see that his eyes were indeed brown. “You know?”

  “I do now. Up until now I only knew that Jonas wasn’t Sarah’s biological father. But I never suspected that her real father was one of her so-called uncles. Thanks for filling in the blanks.”

  “You’re a real smart-ass, Yoder, you know that? Always sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong. Well, I’ll soon take care of that. You like roast turkey, Yoder?”

  “If it’s the self-basting kind, and not too dry.” I took a deep breath and shifted my brain into high gear. “Look, I came here hoping I could work something out with Uncle Jonas. Something legal. Maybe I could help you find a legal out. You know, if you turn yourself in, they might go easier on you.”

  “And her?” He jabbed a stubby thumb back at Diane. “What’s her game?”

  I shrugged as much as my ropes let me.

  “Extortion, that’s what!”

  “But she—” Fortunately I stopped myself. Vengeance or extortion, it didn’t matter right then.

  “What?” he snarled.

  “I was only going to say that I find it almost impossible to believe that a man could kill his own daughter. How could you, Uncle Rudy?”

  “Shut up!”

  There was a desperation in his voice that made me think the devil might have a conscience after all. “Well? She was your own flesh and blood, for Pete’s sake.”

  “I told you, she saw something she wasn’t supposed to see. She had to go. It was her or me.”

  “But why did you have to kill Auntie Rebecca in the first place? Would it have been so bad if she had told? Not that I approve, of course, but people have affairs all the time.”

  He mopped at his face with the loosened tie.

  “Those were different times, Magdalena. I would have been booted out of the family, and I needed the money.”

  “What money?”

  The polyester tie only smeared the sweat around. “My business was failing. You know, the Reagan recession. I needed Vonnie’s income from the trust to keep it afloat.”

  “So Auntie Vonnie was your goose?”

  He stared at me.

  “That laid the golden eggs, I mean.”

  “Yeah, only the goose stopped laying, didn’t it? But by then it didn’t matter. My company suddenly took off in a big way. Who would have thought that little bits of plastic could make me a multimillionaire?”

  “Auntie Vonnie must have,” I said thinking aloud. It is a terrible habit of mine. Undoubtedly it comes from being the oldest child by ten years and playing alone on a farm.

  Uncle Rudy sneered, revealing baby-size teeth. “You’re a smart cookie, Magdalena. And so was Vonnie. She figured early on about my affair with Becca. Sarah had brown eyes like me. The rest of the bunch all have blue or green.

  “But by then I had gotten a patent for my computer chips, and things were looking up for my company in a big way. Did you know that Gerber Electronics ranks number three internationally in computer software? Would you care to guess how many people I employ and what my company does for Pittsburgh’s economy?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Face it, Uncle Rudy. What’s really important is that it pays for Auntie Vonnie’s eight-thousand-square-foot house with the indoor pool and the four-car garage. That’s what bought her silence.”

  “Vonnie loves me,” he said pathetically.

  “Yeah, like I love Shnookums.”

  “What the hell did you say?” His tone was ugly again. If I wasn’t more careful, I was going to have to wear an extra-thick veil on my wedding day.

  “I think we can still work something out, you know,” I said quickly. “If Leona Helmsley could run an empire from jail, why can’t you?”

  He gave me the kind of look I usually reserve for Melvin. “Mine are capital offenses.” He sounded almost proud.

  “What about a temporary insanity plea? You know, say that you were under too much stress at the time.”

  “Yo
u watch too damn much TV,” he growled. Little did he know. “Looks to me like I’ve only got one option.”

  “Turn yourself in and plead guilty?” I asked hopefully.

  I’m sure he would have crawled across the bed and whacked me upside the head with the pistol if Diane hadn’t moaned just then. Uncle Rudy jumped and whirled around, like a child playing hopscotch. It was all I could do to keep from snickering.

  He examined Diane’s ropes and turned back to me. Something about his eyes told me that in that brief moment I had lost all ground.

  “I know you are a religious woman, Magdalena,” he said coldly. “Prepare to die.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Believe it or not, I have heard those words—”prepare to die,” or at least a variation of them—before. And believe it or not, I am prepared to die. I have every confidence in my salvation. Death holds no fear for me. It’s how and when I die that concern me.

  I smiled pleasantly. “You came to Hernia for my wedding, as well as for Sarah’s funeral. You really should wait until you’ve had a chance to attend both. Freni is fixing a wedding feast that would be the envy of Cana—without the wine, of course.”

  “Doctor says I have to watch my cholesterol,” he smirked, “and Freni’s favorite dish is ‘cholesterol casserole.’”

  “Well, you should at least attend your daughter’s funeral. It starts in less than an hour, and you don’t want to be late. There will be plenty of time to kill me when you get back.”

  For some reason that amused him to the point that I got a second view of his tiny yellow teeth. “Oh, I’ll be at that funeral all right. I’ll be sitting right up there in the front row.”

  “And me?” I asked hopefully.

  “You and the rest of the turkeys will be doing what turkeys are meant to do. You’ll be roasting until you’re a nice golden brown.” He laughed again. “Of course, there’s a good chance the oven will be too hot and you’ll be burnt. To a crisp!”

  “Stuff and nonsense,” I said irritably. “Delores does not have an institutional-size oven. And if you ask me, that’s no way to run a proper boarding house. You simply can’t—”

  “Shut it, Yoder. I didn’t ask you. This”—he waved a stubby arm—”is going to be your oven. Only thing is,”—he made a pouting face—”you forgot to bring the spices with you. And what’s a turkey without proper seasoning? I guess I’ll just have to run downstairs and get some.”

  To my surprise he turned and left the room, slamming the door behind him. Perhaps he wasn’t kidding.

  “Don’t forget the sage!” I shouted after him. “And take it easy on the salt. Sodium contributes to water retention, you know.”

  I struggled with my ropes, but it was futile. For one thing, the knots were not within reach of my fingers, and for another, Uncle Rudy had used nylon clothesline. Where he had managed to get yards of the stuff on the spur of the moment was beyond me. Then I remembered that Delores was too cheap to buy a clothes dryer, even too cheap to drive into Bedford and use a laundromat. “My sheets smell fresh, like sunshine,” she once bragged to me. Now, thanks to the old gal’s penny-pinching penchant, not only was I trussed like a turkey but I was about to buy the farm.

  “Why me, Lord?” I said aloud.

  “Ugh,” the good Lord groaned.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Damn, my head hurts.”

  My mouth opened to apple-bobbing width while my battered brain slowly informed me that it wasn’t the Lord who was speaking, but Diane Lefcourt. I had to hand it to the woman. She made a lousy King Tut, but she made up for it with her God imitations, unintentional though they might be. Of course, by that I mean only that her timing was impeccable; she didn’t sound anything like God.

  “Diane?”

  “He gone?”

  “Momentarily.”

  “What happened?”

  “I forgot the salt.”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind. How do you feel?”

  “Like a truck ran over my head, backed up, and ran over it again.”

  “Welcome to the club. How are your knots, dear?”

  “Throbbing,” she said crossly. “I just told you.”

  “Not those kind of knots, sweetie. I meant the kind on your ropes. Can you reach them?”

  She fumbled for a few minutes, breathing heavily. “No.”

  “I can’t reach mine either, but I have an idea. If you can turn your chair around, maybe I can untie them with my toes.”

  At the risk of sounding vain, I am rather good with my toes. They are almost as long and slender as my little finger. If I were to sit immodestly, I could play cat’s cradle all by myself. When Susannah was a little girl and would torment me at the supper table, I sometimes yielded to temptation and extracted my revenge in the presence of Mama and Papa. They never saw me pinch Susannah with my toes, and the knife and fork I held in my hands made perfect alibis.

  “What?” Diane croaked. “Your toes?”

  “I went barefoot all the time as a kid. You wouldn’t believe what I can do with my toes.”

  “You being kinky, Magdalena?”

  There was no time to be offended. “Look, near as I can figure, Uncle Rudy plans to burn this dump down with us turkeys in it. Unless you don’t mind being Thanksgiving dinner five months early, turn your chair around and let me give it a shot.”

  For a fairly small woman—her large caboose aside—Diane made a lot of noise turning that chair around. Anyone directly beneath us might reasonably have guessed that there was an elephant waltzing upstairs. I’m sure being tied to a chair and suffering from a possible concussion made the task a bit difficult, but still, it was no wonder the woman quit the carnival and took up channeling.

  I stretched my toes out as far as I could, but the knots remained out of reach. “Lean back,” I coaxed.

  I’m sure she tried to cooperate, but she was apparently afraid to let her feet leave the floor. Undoubtedly her center of gravity had betrayed her once before.

  “You’re going to need to tip all the way over backwards, hon,” I said encouragingly. “You’ll be landing on the bed. It won’t hurt.”

  “I’m sixty-five years old, Magdalena, and I don’t take estrogen. If I hit the floor I could break a hip. Sisters of the Broken Heart has lousy insurance.”

  I sighed patiently. “If Uncle Rudy gets back up here before we get loose, you won’t have to worry about a hip replacement. Tip over backwards or burn.”

  Diane Lefcourt bravely pushed off with her toes, and just as I’d predicted, the back of her chair smacked against the side of bed. She grunted, but otherwise seemed none the worse for wear.

  “Scoot your hands up a little, dear, if you can,” I said.

  “I am not Houdini,” she said testily.

  I egged her on gently, and at last she managed to wiggle her hands up an inch or so. I had to admire even that small gain, because I am sure it put quite a stress on her shoulder blades. Clearly, she hadn’t been a contortionist in the carnival.

  Fortunately I don’t wear hose or socks in the summer unless I have to. Many Amish women go barefoot at home during the warmer months, and it is a custom that both Susannah and I have chosen to follow. Of course I wear hose to church, but that’s a “have to” situation. After my bath that morning, I had slipped into a pair of sandals, not planning to don “plastic leg casings,” as Susannah calls hose, until the very last moment. At any rate, it was a simple matter for me to kick off my sandals. It was quite another for me to untie the knots.

  “Ouch! You should trim your toenails more often,” Diane complained loudly.

  “Shhh!”

  “But they’re so long and sharp.”

  “Susannah has scars on her shins to prove it.” It was hard to concentrate and talk at the same time.

  “And they stink!”

  “Well, I never! You were there when I bathed!”

  “Ouch!”

  The light pinch on the wrist I’d giv
en her did not merit such a loud reaction. Fortunately the last knot on her wrists came undone and we were able to move quickly on to the other things. Diane was less skilled with her fingers than I was with my toes, but she did manage to untie my knots.

  “Now what?” Perhaps it was her carnival training again, but the woman definitely had a hawker’s voice.

  “I’ll sit back on the bed, pretending to be tied up. Fortunately the door opens to face the bed. The second he starts to open the door I’ll make a noise so he looks my way. In the meantime you’ll be hiding behind the door with the chair. When he opens the door, whack him over the head with it.” I don’t believe in violence, mind you, but turnabout is fair play.

  “But I’m an old woman,” Diane whined. “Why do I have to hit him with the chair?”

  “Because if he sees you sitting on the bed, he’ll be suspicious, that’s why. And you don’t expect me to knock him on the noggin with the bed, do you?”

  She reluctantly agreed to my plan—and just in time too. The instant Uncle Rudy turned the knob I let out a loud wail. Unfortunately King Tut didn’t seem to have the strength of even a mummy and couldn’t lift the chair above shoulder level. Uncle Rudy was not about to stand stock-still and stare at me wail forever.

  “Hit him anyway!” I hollered.

  Even as the last word was coming out of my mouth I leaped on Aaron’s evil uncle. In my mind’s eye I saw it as a powerful, yet graceful act. I was a lioness leaping on her prey. Diane told me later that she thought I looked like a circus clown shot from a cannon.

  What matters is that I connected with Uncle Rudy, as did Diane’s chair. Despite my trim figure, I weigh more than Diane, and the force of my leap, combined with my body weight, exceeded that of her weight and the rather timid whack she administered to Uncle Rudy’s back. The end result was that I ended up on top of Rudy, who ended up on top of the chair. This chain of events could have been disastrous for Diane, except that after delivering her pitiful blow she staggered sideways and safely out of the way. The upshot was that the chair broke another leg. So did Uncle Rudy.

  For a moment I thought his fall had knocked him out, but it had merely winded him. Still, while he was catching his breath, I managed to extract the gun from his chubby little hand. Taking a cue from Susannah, I stowed it in the safest place I knew. Aaron has since told me that this is a very dangerous spot and that an accidental discharge might have sent a bullet straight through my heart. At any rate, the next thing I did was grab those chubby little hands and tie them tightly together with the clothesline. It was while I was working on his feet that Uncle Rudy regained his power of speech.