Just Plain Pickled to Death (6 page)

“Ach, have you lost your memory altogether, Magdalena? It was Aaron and Catherine Miller. Your Aaron’s parents.”

I laughed, albeit nervously. “It’s your memory that’s hit the skids, dear. If I was twenty-six, and my Aaron is the same age, then how could his parents have been celebrating their silver wedding anniversary?”

To her credit, Freni covered her mouth, so I only saw the tips of her smile. “Your Aaron was twenty-four that summer, not twenty-six. You were born the year a tornado took down Wagler Hooley’s barn.”

I felt my stomach fill with lead and sink to the floor. “You sure?”

“Positive. And Aaron was born two years later when we finally raised Wagler Hooley’s new barn.

Wagler was so lazy, he wanted a whole year off from farming. Wouldn’t let us build him a new barn any sooner.”

She was at least right about the barn raising. Mama had gone into labor while helping to serve the community meal. Her water broke just as she was pouring the Amish bishop a glass of cider. Because Papa’s car was blocked in by a sea of buggies, our Mennonite pastor drove Mama home, where I was born. I’d had to suffer through that story a million times.

Because there were two clergymen peripherally involved in my birth, Mama had declared that I would marry a man of the cloth. Instead, I was about to marry a man two years younger than I. A mere child. Perhaps Freni was right; perhaps I really was losing it. I should have remembered that although Aaron and I rode the same school bus, we were not in the same classes in high school. Somehow those two years had gotten lost among the intervening years in my memory.

“Tell Aaron how old I am and I’ll tell your son everything you’ve ever said about his wife,” I said kindly. I’ve made worse threats, if truth be told.

“Deal,” Freni said quickly. “Now do you want to hear about that summer or no?” She barreled on anyway. “Well, Catherine had never been a very healthy woman, and no one thought she would live even that long, so it was an important occasion. The whole family was there to help celebrate, except for you- know-who.”

“Aaron was in Vietnam,” I reminded her.

She tossed her head at such a lame excuse. “Anyway, there was talk about bad feelings among some of the relatives.”

“Which relatives? What sort of bad feelings?”

“Ach, do I get to tell the story or not?”

I hung my head in contrived shame. Years of experience had taught me how to appease the woman.

“The talk was that Rebecca’s husband, Jonas, was jealous of one of the brothers-in-law. That Rebecca was paying too much attention to him and not to Jonas.”

“Which of the brothers-in-law was that?”

“Ach, what does it matter now? It was that Baptist with the accordion that Rebecca had her eye on. After she ran off like that, and then Sarah disappeared, Catherine went downhill fast. Blamed it on herself for having invited everyone to Hernia. She died the following winter.” Freni looked at me accusingly. “Again no Aaron.”

I returned her look. “By then Aaron was a prisoner of war in a bamboo cage a tenth the size of our chicken house.”

Freni volleyed it right back at me. “Ach, the English and their strange ways. Volunteering to go to war.”

“He would have been drafted anyway. He had a very low lottery number. And anyway, Aaron’s not English, he’s a Mennonite, as you well know.” Of course, as a Mennonite, Aaron could have avoided the draft, but I wasn’t going to remind her of that.

Freni rolled her eyes, but I maturely ignored her challenge.

“Do you or do you not recall which of the brothers-in-law was the object of Rebecca’s attention?” I asked.

“Rudy Gerber. But I’m sure the other men got their share of attention too. Rebecca Miller was a wanton woman.”

“Why, Freni, how you talk!”

“It’s true, Magdalena. Her parents should have named her Rahab, after that harlot in the Bible.”

I was shocked. Freni is a one-woman Supreme Court, but words like “wanton” and “harlot” don’t come easily to her lips. Rebecca Miller Weaver must have led a wild life, even by today’s standards.

“Freni, you implied earlier that the whole Miller bunch was strange. What exactly did you mean?”

“You’ve seen them,” she practically shrieked. “Calling themselves the Beeftrust. Imagine that!”

“Being tall and big-boned is no sin, dear,” I reminded her charitably. Freni, who is only a smidgen over five feet tall, harbors a deep resentment of anyone who can cast a shadow after ten in the morning.

“But they all married shorter men, Magdalena. The Bible warns us not to get unequally yoked. You know, like hooking oxen together with asses.”

I smiled patiently. If you let her, Freni would prove that the pope is Jewish.

“The Bible is talking about spiritual equals, not physical. Just because they call themselves the Beeftrust doesn’t mean they’re oxen.”

Freni’s stuck her lower lip out so far that had she been in a rainstorm she would have drowned. I knew she was thinking hard, sorting through almost seventy-five years of memories for proof that the Millers really were a weird bunch. Her eyes brightened suddenly.

“They all moved out of Hernia, didn’t they?” she crowed triumphantly.

“And that makes them strange?”

“Well, even you haven’t moved away from Hernia!”

I turned my head so she wouldn’t see me stick my tongue out. “Try again, dear. If remaining in Hernia is a sign of relative normality, then your daughter- in-law, Barbara, is supernormal. After all, she moved from somewhere else to here.”

“Ach du lieber!” Freni clearly saw the logic in what I had said. It was the same sort of logic that had her convinced that eggs were a fruit.

“Well?”

She stared at me, beaten but far from broken. “Well, I wasn’t going to bring this up, but now you’ve forced me to. Right, Magdalena?”

“You’re absolutely right, dear. Consider yourself forced.”

She sighed in relief. “In that case, you should know that in the autumn the Miller family held a private memorial service.”

“Why, of course! They had every reason to suspect that something terrible had happened to Sarah. And it had.”

“Yah, but from what I heard, the service was for both mother and daughter. Imagine that, and the mother up in the Poconos having a good time.”

“You don’t know that, Freni. Has anyone ever heard from Rebecca since then?”

“Not a peep.”

“And her husband, Jonas? What happened to him?”

She shrugged. “The police questioned him. Several times even, but they let him go. I think I heard once that he lives in Florida now.”

I would have pressed her for even more details of that fateful summer, but Leah had awakened from her nap and, smelling food, had homed straight in on the kitchen.

The two older women got immediately embroiled in a polite but heavy conversation on the right way to make a tongue sandwich. Actually, they may have quarreled, but with the two of them it’s hard to tell. At any rate, while they were thus engaged, I took my tongue and got out of there.

Chapter Seven

It was another perfect day. Lying as it does in a mountain valley, Hernia tends toward cloudy weather. Not so this Saturday afternoon. There weren’t even enough wisps to wind around one cotton candy stick. The temperature was perfect too—somewhere in the mid-seventies.

I took the same path I had taken on that fateful day when I fell in love with my Pooky Bear. The path led out of my driveway, across Hertzler Lane, and over a split rail fence. From there it wound through a lush green pasture—carefully avoiding the cow pies—to the banks of Miller’s Pond. This day, however, I extended the path to the far side of the pasture and into the Miller family farmyard.

Since Aaron and his dad were out shopping, there was no one around except for the cows, an assortment of barn cats, and two or three million sparrows. It was both peaceful and noisy.

I sat on Aaron’s front steps for a few minutes, imagining what it would have been like to be mistress of that domain. It would never be, of course. Aaron and I had decided that we would make the PennDutch our home, although he would continue to give his father a hand with the farm. Eventually the farm would be sold and Aaron would devote his time to helping me run the inn. This was not my idea, mind you. Aaron is not buggy-whipped, no matter what you’re thinking.

While I was sitting there, a large female cat, misnamed Cyrus, jumped into my lap and began twitching her tail nastily in my face. I pushed her off, but she jumped right back up. Before I could push her off again, she started yowling seductively, kneading my thighs with her front paws. Immediately three male cats jumped onto the porch and approached Cyrus and me with great enthusiasm. It was all too horrible for words.

“Get off, Rahab!” I shouted, standing up.

But Cyrus didn’t seem to mind being called a harlot, and she didn’t get off. She had dug her nails into my denim skirt and, whether she intended to do so or not, had become part of my apparel. Unless you’ve tried, you have no idea how hard it is to dislodge a cat’s claws from fabric. I tried mightily, but it was no use.

There was only one option that I could think of, and that was the garden hose (taking off my skirt and walking home in my Hanes Her Way was never an option). Cyrus was heavy, and I staggered off the porch trailed by three horny, howling toms. Had Aaron or his father been home to see the strange procession, I’m sure there never would have been a wedding.

Fortunately the water did the trick, and Cyrus departed my denim, but not without first inflicting some nasty scratches—narrowly missing places my mama didn’t have names for. Needless to say, I had to get drenched in the process, and while the temperature may have been perfect for walking, it wasn’t too pleasant for water activities. Therefore I will claim distraction as a valid excuse when I confess that out of the corner of my left eye I saw something bigger than a cat dart toward the barn, but I could not identify it. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a cow. Cows don’t dart.

I trotted over to the barn, which was open, and peered inside. Approximately half of the floor space was empty save for a rather thick layer of loose hay and dust. Mama would have called it “strubbly,” the Amish word for messy. On the other side of the barn, a jumble of hay bales extended almost halfway up to the rafters. On top of the bales a dozen cats lounged. They regarded me indolently.

“Okay, so I’m imagining things,” I said aloud. “I’m losing my marbles with only a week left before my wedding.”

Behind me I heard a low, jarring thump. I whirled around, but nobody was there. I may as well confess that I screamed nonetheless. The echo of my voice in the half-empty barn gave me the heebie-jeebies, and I fled out into the warm sunshine.

I am not a superstitious person, mind you, but I do believe in ghosts. I know, good Mennonites eschew such beliefs, but I guess my devotion to my faith will just have to remain suspect. I believe in ghosts because I have seen one. The specter I saw was my Grandma Yoder, and no one—not even my pastor—can tell me I didn’t. And I didn’t see Grandma just out of the corner of my eye either. I saw her, clear as day, in the bed in which she died— a week after she was buried. So real was Grandma that had I sat on the bed next to her, she would have snapped at me for messing up the covers.

Maybe it’s because I live in a predominantly cloudy climate, but I think sunshine can heal just about anything. As my skirt dried, my cowardice vanished, and within twenty minutes I was ready for anything—except another close encounter with Cyrus. It was in this moment of sun-charged energy that I forgot my limitations and recklessly set out to investigate the Miller family root cellar. It was from there that the barrel of kraut containing Sarah Weaver had come.

This root cellar is a subterranean room with stone walls and heavy wooden doors that open upward and outward. It adjoins the foundation of the house, on the north side, and there is a narrow door that leads from it into the basement proper. Aaron says that visitors from the Midwest have compared the cellar to a tornado shelter. Having never been to the Midwest, I wouldn’t know. I can only hope Midwestern children have as much fun playing in their storm cellars as Aaron and I did in his root cellar (when we were kids, I mean).

If I remembered correctly, the Millers kept a padlock in the door hasp, but they never locked it. Aaron said there was no need to, since the back door of the house was never locked anyway. The padlock, like the sometimes locked front door, was just for show. Now, however, the lock was gone altogether, no doubt in the possession of the maniac mantis, Melvin.

I tugged on one of the heavy doors. It seemed stuck at first, and then it fairly flew into my face, knocking me over backward. It was just as well that I was sitting down, because I would have sat down just as hard when I saw that face grinning up at me.

The face belonged to Uncle Elias Fike, Auntie Magdalena’s husband. “Whoa! Didn’t mean for that to happen!” it said.

I struggled for several minutes to catch my breath. My speaking voice came back a few seconds after that. I will edit those first words out of my mouth, on the chance that some of you still have standards. I must admit—and shamefully so—that mine had been gradually slipping, thanks to Susannah. She knows foul words for things Mama didn’t even know existed.

“Hey, I said I was sorry,” Elias repeated. “You gave me a quite a start as well. What are you doing here?”

“Me? I’m not the one caught snooping in someone else’s cellar, am I?”

He had the nerve to smile. “No? Then why are we having this conversation?”

“Beats me. I’m not actually in the cellar, am I?”

“Well, I’m a member of the family, so I have a right to be here.”

“You’re only connected by marriage, which is exactly what I’ll be too, come next Saturday. So don’t think you’re one up in the rights department.”

He bowed slightly. “In that case, by all means come on down. But there’s nothing down here worth seeing.”

“Says who?”

“Look for yourself.”

“What’s in those barrels?”

“Sauerkraut, cider, and pickles. Of course, now it will spoil because someone has pried open the tops.”