Henry asks what time it is and I tell him that “It’s after supper. Mom’s worried sick and Dad’s sick of her worrying.” (That’s something Dad would say.) “He wouldn’t let us look for you until we all cleaned off our plates.”
You’d think we’d be hungry and grateful and want to finish our supper after all the slave labour we do, but none of us have wanted to eat our mother’s cooking since Dad hit the oldest, gnarliest, pronghorn deer on the whole damn planet with the truck and brought it home. I don’t know what part we ate tonight, but I think there’s a butthole stuck in my throat.
“Is he mad?” Henry says, rubbing his eyes with his fists like a little girl.
“Are you an idiot”? I ask, adding grit.
He wants to cry, I can tell he does. He’s thinking about throwing sheep dung at me and I wish he would. But the ringing of Dad’s boots clomping across the floor of the barn quickly snuffs Henry’s courage.
Stand up. Don’t look up, I think, as intensely as I can.
He stays down, with his legs folded behind him. He’s holding the lamb’s ear between his thumb and fingers, stroking it like a baby blanket. If anyone’s asking for a beating, that’s exactly how to do it.
He looks up and I think, Don’t look down.
He looks down. He knows he’s in trouble, but doesn’t get what he’s done wrong.
I know his muscles will be hurting him by now from cold that’s crept up through the floor into his legs. Dad stands over him, glowering long enough to make him really feel it, and then a little longer, for good measure.
“You come find me when you have something to tell me,” Dad says. He never says what we should come tell him. We have to figure that bit out for ourselves.
Before he leaves, Dad spits on the floor, as though spitting the taste of fatherhood out of his mouth. Henry looks at me when he’s gone and I call him a little shit. I mean it to help toughen him because scar tissue is tougher than regular skin. Henry needs to learn that Dad doesn’t have any soft edges. He cherishes his anger, keeps it clenched like a closed fist around a sharp pebble until the stone has created a scar. He has a collection of these souvenirs, gained from teaching each of his sons a lesson.
By the next morning Dad’s breathing is coarse enough to scour Henry’s shame, which he’s carried through the night, to a fine polish. I can practically see myself in its reflection.
It’s a school day today and we’re already late and waiting to be dismissed from the table. If we have to run to be on time, the breakfast that’s lumping in our guts will turn to cement.
“We have to go. Teacher will be upset with us,” Henry says, a feeble attempt to save the rest of us. We use the distraction and leave him as a sacrifice. It’s him Dad wants, anyway.
“You go too,” Mom says to him before we’re all out the door. Then, to Dad, “He’ll be late and Mrs. Knelson will think we have trouble at home.
“Go on,” she says to Henry.
Momma’s boy.
“You’re too damn attached to that lamb,” Dad says, unable to deny his wife’s good sense. It’s a parting shot that hits its target squarely between the shoulders before Henry limps away.
Outside, the lamb is in the barnyard with its mother, separate from the other sheep. Henry stops to pet it and says, “Don’t worry.” When it pushes its nose into his hand, he promises to be back soon. You can see that the affection makes my brother hurt. The way he walks away from the lamb, I can tell he’s already learning.
I can tell, too, that Henry is nervous. He hums while he walks, fitting notes together like a puzzle with no solution. He begins to tug on a frayed thread on the cuff of his sweater until it becomes a hole, its fibres reaching out to one another across the damage. He falls way behind by the time we’ve walked the two miles to school, and the next time I see him is through the classroom window when he nearly goes past the school.
He slinks through the door and into the back of the class. He’s trying to be very small. It only makes him more visible.
Later, when school is let out, we start by walking home with him. He’s slow and mopey, and soon we leave him behind to find his own way. Before we’re too far ahead we turn back and bleat, “Baa.” We feel sly. Slick. Smart.
Henry absorbs our taunt and continues to shuffle, looking as though he’s been shot full of lead. We’re doing him a kindness. He’s about to find out whether he has enough scar tissue to protect him.
We’re the first onto the yard and so we’re the first to see. We walk by, all of us, and look right at it. It’s the only way Dad will let us keep going.
None of us can run back and help Henry now. He’s too close and looking down at his feet, one shoelace trailing through the dust and tripping him.
“Keep going,” I say under my breath. But he looks up and stops.
There’s Dad, sharpening the knife he uses for killing.
There’s the lamb, tied to the fence. Henry looks at Dad and Dad holds out the knife.
“Don’t cry,” I say quietly. He doesn’t.
“Don’t look away.” He doesn’t.
MENNONITES DON’T DANCE
LIZBETH BENT TO PICK UP A spoon, wiped away the small splat of cream gravy left where it had fallen, and paused to watch her mother and sisters’ feet moving over the kitchen floor. A choreography of sensible shoes.
If she’d had her way, Lizbeth would’ve hitched a ride into town that morning with her father and two of her brothers. Even though all they planned to do there was buy two more cartons of grapefruit and maybe argue down the price of a reconditioned tractor.
Lizbeth would’ve given her left braid to get near a little civilization, even if it was only Swift Current. From the tractor yard she could watch people as they walked along the sidewalk. Imagine they were going to the mall or a matinée. More than anything, Lizbeth wanted to go to a matinée.
She was a bother in the kitchen, anyway. But because hundreds of years of Mennonite tradition weren’t about to give her a day off to indulge in some civilization, she swaddled herself in an apron first thing every morning, just like her mother and sisters. Sisters who, unlike Lizbeth, never thought of running to the edge of their village to see whether they’d fall off a precipice. Straight into the real world.
Since she couldn’t go into the city accompanied by at least one member of her family, the best part of Lizbeth’s day, the part she lived for, was when her father and brothers came in from the fields for lunch. Lizbeth plonked whatever bowl of dough she was babysitting onto the counter and hurried to meet them at the door.
Her oldest brother, Matthew — who lived three houses down the one-and-only road in the village, and had already spent ten years getting his own house ready for the wife God had pre-planned for him, whoever she was — was the first one in the door. He chuckled at Lizbeth, greeting him at the door as faithfully as any dog, and set down a bulging crate of citrus. “Been doing lots of cooking, I see.”
No one in the family could miss the fact that their mother’s domestic genes had been magnetically repelled by Lizbeth. No one took it very seriously. They all assumed Lizbeth would eventually fit into the mould.
She already belonged in other ways, though. Her thighs, for example, which had thickened since she turned thirteen, certainly made her look Mennonite.
Matthew tousled Lizbeth’s hair, although she was old enough that he’d soon have to stop kidding with her. Just one more reason, as far as Lizbeth could tell, that there was nothing much to look forward to about growing up. Especially growing up Mennonite. The only people more excruciatingly bland were the Hutterites, with their farm cooperatives and shared everything. Like living in a nunnery, except you still had to clean up after the men and have dozens and dozens of children.
Lizbeth’s mother had grown up a Hutterite. Since they came from the same square wheel as the Mennos, her marriage to Lizbeth’s father didn’t make them unequally yoked. It explained a lot, though. Like why her mother alternately defended communal livin
g, yet was glad to be among Mennonites and all their loosey-goosey ways.
“The Hutterites have the best sewing machines you’ll ever see,” Lizbeth’s mother told her once, as though it were an object lesson. A little memory nugget Lizbeth could keep in her pocket. Same as, “You won’t want to be caught with idle hands if the Lord returns today.”
“So, what’s the point of a fancy sewing machine if you think zippers are the Devil’s fastener?” Lizbeth had retorted.
“That’s the Amish, honey,” her mother said, as though that made Mennonites, who had shunned rubber tires for years, normal. Lizbeth considered it a modern miracle that her family owned two Ford trucks and a car. One of the trucks was Matthew’s. And the car was for taking Lizbeth’s mother wherever she needed to go, which was usually to the church with a jellied salad. She had an entire cookbook of jellied salads, and never made the same one twice.
The first four of Lizbeth’s brothers were named for the Gospels, and the youngest of all the Klassen kids for the Apostle Paul, which had made Sunday school memorizations easy for Lizbeth for about a minute, until they moved on to the disciples and books of the Old Testament. There were also Mary, Ruth and Lizbeth; not quite Elizabeth.
“Hey, where’s John?” Lizbeth asked when all of her other brothers and father had filed into the house for lunch. She weaved her way around them and leaned out the door, anxious to see her favourite brother, older than her by only two years.
When Lizbeth had had trouble writing a school essay on the differences between the first four books of the New Testament, and why they didn’t contradict each other, John was the one who stayed up with her late into the night, until she could explain it to him backwards and forwards. She’d wanted to write about the differences between her brothers: “How Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (and Paul) All Have Separate Arms and Legs but Share the Same Brain.” John had laughed, but hadn’t let her write it, saying it was important to understand why the Bible made sense.
“He went to the barn,” said Matthew, tossing the words over his shoulder like salt. He’d already pressed a slice of cold butter into a fresh bun and was about to reach for another. “Said he wanted to check on that old cow that’s about ready to drop its calf.”
“Mom. Can I take him his lunch?” Lizbeth said as her mother hurried over to the table with a plate of chicken, another of cold ham and hot, boiled wieners.
“Yes, yes, go. Take enough for you both,” she said. “Just put on some rubber overshoes first.” Lizbeth grabbed a handful of buns, forked some meat into them, and snatched both of the chicken’s feet before her mother finally swished her away with the same distracted affection as when she whisked cats from the front door with a broom.
With her bundle of food and a thermos of strong coffee, Lizbeth hurried over the gravel path from the house to the barn. After all those hours in the kitchen, she was relieved to be outside and running. Every few steps though, she had to slow down and rearrange her hurriedly assembled picnic, as well as the long skirt of her housedress that kept bunching up between her legs.
She didn’t even care. Not when, all morning, she’d plotted how to get out of the kitchen. And, now that she’d unexpectedly been given a reprieve, Lizbeth put a tick into her column of prayers God had answered. If she was lucky she might even have time to show John the new game she’d thought of, using empty coffee tins and a quarter she found on the way home from school. Whoever won would get to keep the quarter.
“C’mon Lizzy, help me with her,” John said when Lizbeth swung open the barn door. His back was to her but he didn’t need to turn around to see who was there. He always knew it was her.
“Just a sec.” Lizbeth stepped into the milk-separating room, which smelled of sour milk but was kept as clean as her mother’s dish cupboard.
Lizbeth set down the food on a scrubbed melamine table in the centre of the room and joined John at of the calving stall.
“She’s in trouble,” he said when Lizbeth came up behind him. The Jersey lay on its side, barely moving. Lizbeth recognized the animal as the oldest cow of their family’s modest herd, the one that Lizbeth liked best because it didn’t swish its tail in her face when milked, even though it was known for doing it to everyone else. “I don’t know that we can save her, but the calf maybe.”
“I brought lunch,” Lizbeth said. The boys were always starved by noon and John, at almost sixteen, had the biggest appetite of them all. He usually wolfed down his food and looked around to see if anyone had leftovers. Their mother was as proud of John’s appetite as any godly woman could afford to be. She liked to tell her fellow church ladies, as they sat around quilting or filling boxes for orphanages in Paraguay, that he ate a loaf of bread every day. “Sure, Mom. It’s a real triumph.” Lizbeth had snorted as she stuffed some New Testament finger puppets into the orphan boxes, although she thought everything about John was pretty cool. Even the fact that he wasn’t very cool was cool to her.
“Later. We have to deliver this calf right now,” John said, snapping Lizbeth back to the present.
“We?” said Lizbeth. “I can go back to the house. I can run there. Dad or Matthew — ”
“Nuh-uh, this old girl’s always liked you,” John said. He grabbed her hand and tugged her towards the cow. “She’ll be better if you’re here. Help me get her up.” He nudged Lizbeth round to the front of the animal.
Lizbeth nervously tucked her skirt between her legs, wishing she’d snuck on a pair of Paul’s trousers under her dress. Slipping her hands beneath the cow’s shoulder, she saw something move under the taut drum of its distended belly. The calf must still be alive. Lizbeth was as glad for her brother’s sake as anything. He was always the one to get attached to the livestock, as though they weren’t all destined for the sausage grinder sooner or later.
“Okay, now,” John said, and together they started to rock the cow, trying to give her enough momentum to get to her feet. If she couldn’t, they’d have to call their father to come with the tractor and chains.
“Good girl, you’re okay.” Lizbeth murmured encouragingly, bending down until she leaned her whole body into the bulk of the animal, her face pressed against its warm hide. “Just get up and it will all be okay. Please,” she said and began to pray. Please, it’s just another cow, but it will make my brother happy. Oh, and also because cows cost money, she added, thinking of what a waste it would be if her father lost a cow and a calf on the same day. Anyway, it seemed like the right thing to pray, more persuasive than if she asked something for herself.
With an urgent lowing sound that reminded Lizbeth of the way she herself moaned when she had the stomach flu and was about to be sick, the cow got to its knees. It laboured to breathe, it’s ribs working like bellows, until it finally managed to stand.
“There now,” Lizbeth said, pleased that her prayer appeared to be working. She stroked the broad plane between the cow’s eyes. From where Lizbeth stood, she could see her brother work. He unbuttoned his sleeve cuff and pushed it up to his shoulder before he plunged his arm deep inside the backend of the cow. Lizbeth cringed, unsure whether she should feel worse for the cow or John.
“Keep her still,” he said. And after a few minutes, “Okay, come and see this, Lizzy.”
Lizbeth brushed her hand along the side of the cow as she walked, to let it know where she was, and came round to stand next to her brother in a puddle of water and blood and liquid black manure that smelled worse than anything Lizbeth had ever smelled. She wished she had obeyed her mother and put on the overshoes.
John was covered in a wash of mucousy red fluid that soaked through his clothes and dripped like snot onto his rubber boots. He had smeared it across the side of his face when he’d withdrawn his arm from the cow. Probably the only things left clean are his socks, Lizbeth thought, knowing his clothes wouldn’t even make it into today’s laundry. She tried not to imagine what they’d smell like after being stuffed into the hamper and left to ripen and get crusty for a day or two.
This wasn’t the first time Lizbeth had seen calving and she thought she knew what to expect. Still, she’d never been right up to the business end of things. A spindly leg emerged, before withdrawing again, as though testing the air to see whether it was a nice day outside. Another leg, followed by a brown nose, already snuffling. John spread a bed of fresh straw before he slipped his hand past the small brown head and carefully guided the calf out of its mother, until the entire little animal spilled onto the straw and the mother crumpled back onto her side.
“What will happen to the calf if the mother dies?” Lizbeth said as she helped her brother rub the newborn down with fresh handfuls of hay.
“He’ll be fine so long as one of the other cows cares for him. Otherwise, I guess you and I will have to take turns giving him milk from a bucket.”
At the old water pump next to the house, Lizbeth and John stopped to wash up before eating the lunch Lizbeth had retrieved from the milk separating room. Calving was messy, slippery work. Worse than cooking. Worse, even, than laundry.
John primed the water pump by lifting and lowering the long handle, and soon Lizbeth could tell by his rhythm that the tension in the handle had changed; water would sluice from the spout with the next pump.
As they had done when they were little, Lizbeth and John kicked off their shoes and socks and slapped their bare feet in the cold well water — “a pair of little ducks,” their mother used to call them — as it spilled onto the smooth wooden platform. It was April, not yet warm enough for wet feet, and they laughed at the shock and daring. Lizbeth squealed when her brother flicked water at her with his fingers. Just as she was about to step away, he pumped the handle twice more, quickly, splashing her legs and soaking the hem of her dress. She hopped up and down in the puddle and vowed to get him back.
Shivering, they finally sat down on a dry corner of the wood to eat. The rubbery toes of chicken feet were like warm fingers against their cheeks as they chewed on the soles. John nudged Lizbeth with his elbow and laughed. “Hey, good job today,” he said. “Too bad you can’t cook as well as you can get dirty. Remember the last time you tried to make cracklings?”
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