Mean and Shellfish

by Tamar Myers

  ‘Hop in, toots,’ I said, letting my temper get the best of me yet again. ‘Think of the goat cart as a golden coach, and you’re an English princess.’

  ‘The cart is disgustingly filthy,’ she said, ‘and the goat stinks.’

  ‘Ah, if only I had a magic wand, I would change a couple of things,’ I said. ‘Now, remember to smile, and do at least try to turn your head from side to side, once we cross the bridge, so that your many fans can get a glimpse of your unique face.’

  Much to my surprise, Ida did board the cart without further ado, although it required me placing my gangly arms around her considerable midriff and heaving her into the cart as if she were a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound sack of potatoes. Then I had to climb aboard and help settle her in the middle of the wooden seat, which fortunately was made from a solid oak plank.

  ‘Where are the reins?’ she asked, while still trying to catch her breath.

  ‘Ida, dear, you don’t have to worry about steering the cart. This handsome young lad there, standing discreetly by the goat – neither of whom heard a word of our conversation – is Miguel Yoder, the adopted son of third cousins, thrice removed. Miguel was born in Mexico, but he’s the good kind of Mexican, not the bad kind that you may have heard so much about.’

  Although in full disclosure, Miguel did cheat on an eighth-grade history test – or so I’ve been told. Not that I listen to gossip. And I heard that in church one Sunday he was seen checking his phone messages when he was supposed to be praying. ‘Anyway, Miguel will have his strong brown hand on the Gruff’s harness the entire time, so you are not to worry about running off the bridge or, heaven forfend, Gruff getting stung by a bee, in which case you might end up all the way down in the State of Maryland. Personally, I never travel there unless I’m carrying provisions because—’

  ‘Magdalena,’ Ida said, ‘shut up, and let’s get this circus on the road.’

  ‘Hold your horses, toots. Lest you be unduly worried that this rickety old cart tip over on its way across this ancient bridge, I shall walk beside the cart with a steadying, liver-spotted hand clasped firmly on one of these rotting side boards. OK, Miguel,’ I sang out in my not-so-melodious voice, ‘take her away!’

  Then the most astonishing thing happened. Billy Goat Gruff took two steps forward, just enough really to put tension on the traces, when there was a snapping sound. That’s when Billy trotted to freedom, right out of his broken restraints, and straight across the bridge to uproarious laughter, followed by thunderous applause.

  Miguel, who was just a teenager, and could be excused for his behaviour, slunk away with embarrassment.

  At that point my mother-in-law swore like the proverbial sailor. But I can’t be absolutely certain of it, because some of the words that issued from her mouth I’d never heard even Gabe use. I knew that a tea kettle left untended will eventually boil itself dry, so I waited a couple of minutes until she ran out of steam.

  ‘Never fear, Ida, dear. I will pick up the traces myself, and whilst doing my inimitable imitation of a goat – baaing, of course – I shall hoof it across the bridge and deliver your exalted self to the award ceremony. Good baa.’

  ‘You vill pay for dis!’ she shouted at my back.

  FIFTEEN

  As per tradition, albeit one of only four years standing, as soon as the cart crossed the village side of Slave Creek, villagers showered the children with candy. Meanwhile I grabbed Agnes who was needlessly worrying about doing a sound check on the stage microphone. After all, I promised Ida that I’d use the megaphone, and to be completely honest, did anyone really want to hear what she had to say? I realize that doesn’t sound very Christian of me, but Ida was an outsider, an over-educated New Yorker, a buttinsky, who’d admitted to having it in for me before she’d come to live in Hernia. Besides, she’s been living a lie the entire time, with her fake accent, and her acquired persona, and that cult that had sucked in all our depressed Herniaites. The woman deserved to be ridden out of town on a rail, except that we didn’t have one.

  ‘So, Mags,’ Agnes said, perhaps with a modicum of pain, ‘please let up on the grip you have on my shoulder. I’m not old enough to qualify for Medicare, and my insurance policy doesn’t cover physical therapy.’

  First, I pulled her inside the police station which, I was glad to see, was empty at the moment. Then I gently massaged my best friend’s shoulder as I spoke – or at least I tried to.

  ‘Sorry about that, but she’s a fraud, Agnes! She’s a lying fraud.’

  ‘All right, I’ll buy that,’ Agnes said, ‘but given that you have the ability to – uh – not see the best in everybody, to whom are you referring now?’

  ‘Ida!’

  Agnes appeared taken aback. ‘Ida? Isn’t she old hat? I mean we’ve dissected that old biddy’s bad habits until there’s nothing left except for the actual habit that she used to wear when she was still a nun. Even then you called it the most disgusting shmatta you’d ever seen. “A burlap sack with four holes,” you said.’

  ‘This is much more than that! Her Yiddish accent is all put on. Agnes, she’s a neurosurgeon, for crying out loud.’

  Agnes reached up and placed a plump hand against my forehead. ‘Mags, you don’t feel hot. Don’t get angry now, but have you been drinking?’

  ‘Jam roly-poly!’ I swore. ‘Oops, pardon my foul mouth. My swearing has really gotten out of hand. Of course I haven’t been drinking – you know me better than that. When Ida and I were on the other side of the bridge, she suddenly started speaking in perfect, unaccented, English. Real English. You know, American English – the kind without an accent. She said that this Yiddisher mama thing was all an act, as was the Mother Malaise shtick.’

  Agnes’s eyes were as big as dinner plates. ‘Why would she do that? I mean, leave an exciting place like New York to walk around in a gunny sack for all those years to torture you – oh my goodness! That’s exactly it, isn’t it? That woman was determined to go to any length to get between you and Gabe. Magdalena, she’s not only psychotic, but she’s dangerous!’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said quietly, as the full meaning of Ida’s revelation hit me. ‘Agnes, this means that my husband, the one person who pledged before God to have my back until death do us part, has been a party to this deception all these years.’

  ‘Huh?’ Agnes said. ‘But Mags, I was at your wedding; I don’t remember any pledge about having each other’s backs.’

  ‘Oh, I could just strangle you now, Agnes, if I wasn’t a pacifist,’ I hissed, sounding like a bag full of angry snakes.

  ‘S-s-sorry,’ Agnes hissed back. ‘You’re absolutely right about Gabe. Why, I could just wring that scoundrel’s neck – and I am a pacifist. What a horrible act of betrayal and deception. Oh Mags, my heart breaks for you.’

  Then, because we were both Mennonites of Amish descent, who’ve been bred over the centuries to be even more stoic than the British, we each allowed six tears to fall – three from each eye – and then hugged each other – bosoms barely touching – while we slapped each other’s backs in a contest to see who could get the other one to burp first. In a nutshell, that is what I call the ‘Mennonite hug’.

  ‘So, what are you going to do?’ Agnes asked, after a long, uncomfortable period of silence, during which we avoided making eye contact.

  ‘I’m going to let him hang.’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘Well, Ida’s very last words to me were back in her shtetel accent. They were also a threat. She seems to think that I intended for Billy to break loose. That I planned it as a way to humiliate her. Anyway, if she continues to speak like the old Ida, I’m not going to say anything. Yet. I’m going to wait and see how the two Idas plan to resolve the dilemma they’ve gotten themselves into.’

  ‘Good for you,’ Agnes said, ‘but consider this, if Ida Rosen is kookier than a room full of Black Forest clocks, and doesn’t tell Gabe about her lapse into Standard English, then what?’

  ‘Well then—’


  Then the door to our small police station opened and Willie (short for Wilhelmina) Troyer literally flew in – well, not quite. Today, everyone and their uncle misuses the word literally, when they really mean to say virtually. But with a pair of balsa wood arm struts and enough feathers, Willie might be able to at least glide, if given a gentle push from a tall enough building.

  The woman is petite. Not only is she short, but if she weighs more than eighty pounds, then I’ll agree to give Ida Rosen a month of daily foot rubs. This year Willie was the festival’s designated ‘timekeeper’. It was her job to make sure that events began and ended on schedule, most especially the award ceremony.

  ‘Ladies,’ she chirped when she beheld us, ‘It’s ten minutes past noon. All of Hernia is looking for you!’

  ‘Well, not all of Hernia,’ I said. ‘Patty King, who suffers from agoraphobia, hasn’t put a toe across her threshold in thirty-five years.’

  ‘This is not the time to be a smart mouth,’ Agnes scolded me.

  Thank goodness that Agnes is shaped like a wrecking ball, and I mean that both literally, and kindly. My bestie led the way through the teeming throng, with me following, and wee Willie bringing up the rear. Still, even with Agnes leading the way, there were so many large hats, parasols, and bobbing balloons to contend with, that I couldn’t see the stage until we right in front of it. Then my jaw dropped so low in disbelief at what I saw, that I virtually dislocated it.

  Enthroned in a crudely carved, gilded chair with cheap blue upholstery sat a very smug Ida Rosen. She was wearing a white taffeta gown that had probably been procured from a second-hand bridal shop. Long white satin gloves continued well past her elbows to her fleshy upper arms where they were filled beyond their capacity. That is putting it kindly, by the way.

  On her head, Ida wore a ridiculously tall tiara, from which sparkled the finest bits of glass that one can purchase for under fifty dollars. I’d seen similar pieces of jewellery before on our more liberal teens on prom night. A massive glass necklace made to resemble tier upon tier of fake diamonds was spread across her behemoth of a bosom, and a bracelet comprised of many strands of glass encircled one gloved wrist.

  The second that I saw Ida up there posing as a queen, I attempted to feint to the left of Agnes and put my God-given, long, spindly legs to good use by leaping on to the stage. I didn’t even stop to think about the fact that by doing so, many men, and worse, impressionable young boys, might get a glimpse of my sturdy Christian underwear. Oh, the sins that I might have inadvertently caused them to commit!

  But alas, Ida locked eyes with mine that same instant. She reached over to a small table beside her, picked up the megaphone and brought it to her bright red lips.

  ‘Ladies und gentlemen off Hernia,’ she blared into the machine. ‘Dis eez your fees-tee-val queen, Her Majesty, Queen Ida Rosen. I am sanking you wery much for dis honour. I vill try to be a vize moan-ark und not to raise your taxes too mooch.’

  Everyone laughed at the little joke. When Ida set the megaphone down and smiled regally, the crowd hooted and hollered their support. Oh, what loyal subjects. Even the Baptist minister, of all people, got into the act by bursting into a rousing, and rather moving, rendition of ‘God Save the Queen’. Most unfortunate was the fact that a good deal more of our citizenry than I’d ever dreamed of not only knew the tune (which is the same as our patriotic song, ‘My County T’is of Thee’), but they knew the words. Now that shocked me to the core. This could only mean that British television programs had infiltrated the heartland of God-fearing America.

  Had the Brits been exporting their television shows to us as a propaganda tool? I’m not big on conspiracy theories, but let me just say this: our neighbour to the north is part of the British Commonwealth, so don’t be surprised to wake up some fine morning to learn that Canada has invaded us. I’m just saying. And by the way, from that moment on, I promised myself I would stop using British baking terms as my preferred profanity.

  At any rate, there in downtown Hernia, village of my birth, where I am the mayor and also, let’s not forget, the village’s chief benefactress, hundreds of my friends and relatives were serenading my nemesis. Oh, the humiliation! I felt like finding a crack in the pavement at my feet – of which there were plenty – and crawling into it. But when Agnes joined in the powerfully emotive anthem, I would have crawled out of my crack anyway and given her a very unchristian smack on her buttocks. Of course, the aforementioned assault would have been figurative, not literal. Actually, I would have just made a fool out of myself trying to shush a crowd of hundreds of emotional people, and then eject a popular octogenarian from the stage.

  Now, I’m not saying that it was a miracle that saved me, because demons can’t work miracles. But it was most definitely an unexpected turn of events that came from out of left field, and at just the right moment. Halfway through our anthem, the stench of rotten eggs suddenly became so overpowering that the festival attendees stopped singing, and stampeded hither and thither, as they charged in the various directions to where’d they’d parked their cars. In the blink of an eye, even ‘Her Majesty’ had vacated the stage. But that was by no means the end of the instantaneous evacuation. It was a wonder that no one was injured in the stampede. As it was, there were a few minor fender benders as our visitors tried to leave town simultaneously through just two exits.

  I am by no means a hero, but I stood my ground. I did so only because I take my responsibilities as mayor seriously. That, and because I recognized the offensive odour as that of raw sewage. We in Hernia do not have a village sewer system. Instead, each residence has a septic tank buried at the rear of the house. Every five years or so, our septic tanks must be emptied by a professional waste removal company. Therefore, I was rather certain that a private residence was not involved.

  But surely the source of this noxious odour was located somewhere here, on Main Street, in our little so-called commercial district. Trust me, my probing proboscis is the envy of many a bloodhound owner, so I was able to locate the origin of the revolting stench merely by turning my head slightly to the right.

  The stage was set in front of Sam Yoder’s Corner Market, the first business one comes to on Main Street after crossing the bridge. Adjacent to Sam’s, in a separate brick building, is Cheryl Rosen’s bizarrely named antique shop: Amish Luxuries. Between the two buildings a thick hose was pumping raw sewage out at an astonishing rate. Clearly someone had sabotaged the festival, and someone was going to answer for their crime.

  I may be over half a century old, but I am still capable of running. I dropped my purse and ran like a girl – that is to say, fearlessly and fast. I hoofed it around Sam Yoder’s store and immediately I spotted the culprit. A sewage disposal truck was parked in the narrow alley that runs behind Sam and Cheryl’s store, and its engine was running. A hose connected to it snaked through their two buildings. Foolishly, perhaps, I continued running until I reached the truck. What I planned to do with the person, or persons, I hadn’t the foggiest idea. I wouldn’t have used a firearm, even if I had had one, and I didn’t have my purse to swing at the culprit (that I might have done). All I had as a weapon was my big fat mouth with its liver-coloured lips.

  Fortunately, when I reached the truck there was no one anywhere to be seen. There was, however, a placard laying on the driver’s seat with the following words inscribed on it in gothic lettering: This is just a warm-up.

  I dialled Toy, like I should have in the first place. ‘Where the clanger are you in Bedfordshire?’ I shouted.

  ‘I’m at Primrose and Main, Magdalena, regulating traffic flow on the bridge. I’ve got Deputy Hayes answering accident reports. Unless there’s been an injury, they’re just to exchange information. As for those two deputies that Bedford loaned me – well, I guess that they drove off holding their noses. So tell me, what’s up, and where are you?’

  After I filled him in Toy was silent for far longer than I expected him to be. I knew that he’d be angry at me
for being so impetuous, but I didn’t think he’d give me the silent treatment.

  ‘What in tarnation is a “clanger”, if not the metal thing inside a bell that strikes against the sides?’

  ‘That’s a “clangor” with an “O”. The former is a British suet pastry that has a savoury filling at one end, and a sweet filling at the other. A meal in one item, so to speak. And I didn’t mean to cuss British, it just sort of slipped out.’

  ‘OK then, now that my education is complete, we can move on. Magdalena, I don’t care what they say, you are both the gutsiest, and most foolhardy, woman that I’ve ever met. But if you keep acting on impulse, one of these days Gabe is going to be called into the Bedford morgue and asked to identify you on a slab.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I said. ‘So what do they say about me? If it’s Miranda Speicher who is spreading rumours, I didn’t mean to push her off the monkey bars in second grade. And Noah Webber totally had what I did coming to him; he sat on my pack lunch on the bus and squished it flatter than a pancake.’

  ‘I don’t mean to be rude,’ Toy said, ‘but it isn’t easy talking with you, while at the same time preventing impatient people from ramming tons of steel into each other. So do me a favour, will you? See what you can find out about that waste disposal truck. Like who rented it, and when.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  ‘You’re the boss, Magdalena. I work for the Village of Hernia, and essentially, you are the village. Keep that in mind if anyone gives you grief about this entire fiasco of a day, because it wasn’t your fault. OK, gotta go.’

  Scottish shortbread fingers! That was a mixed message if ever I heard one. The day had been a complete failure, but it wasn’t my fault, despite the fact that I ran the village with the power of an autocrat. That’s how I interpreted his statement, and boy, did that ever rub me the wrong way. Just for the record, I’d decided to go back to swearing with British baking terms, on the off-chance that I was right about the impending Canadian invasion.