Just Plain Pickled to Death (7 page)

“Melvin.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Our local constable.” Would that he were. The worst English constable would have it hands down over Melvin when it came to brains. Or personality, for that matter. No, if Melvin were British, he’d be a member of the royal family.

“You never did say what you are doing here. Don’t you have a root cellar of your own?”

“My mother was color-blind,” I said.

“What?”

It was a trick I learned from Susannah. When cornered, divert the enemy’s attention and then sneak away. So to speak.

“I said my mother was color-blind.”

“I heard what you said. What’s it supposed to mean?”

He had confused me, possibly a diversionary plan of his own. “It means what it means. She was, and I’m not.”

“Are you saying your mother wasn’t a racist, but you are?”

“What?”

“Because if it bothers you to marry into a family with an African American member, maybe you should think again. I’ve been married to Magdalena for fifty-two years, and I don’t plan to get a divorce anytime soon.”

I stared openmouthed long enough to collect a snootful of flies before the cerebral lightning hit. Fortunately there was a light breeze, which kept insects at bay.

“I meant color blindness literally. My mama couldn’t tell blue from purple, or green from brown. It’s a very rare condition in women, you know, but it does happen. Since Mama almost always wore navy or black, it didn’t matter much in clothes, but I used to have to help her choose her embroidery thread.”

“So?”

“So, your left sock is brown, your right sock is green.”

He had a deep, hearty laugh. “Yeah, well, if my wife would sort them, it wouldn’t happen so much.”

“You could learn to sort them yourself. She could mark the pair with letters or numbers and then you could sort them when you took them out of the dryer. You do your own laundry, don’t you?”

“Poor Aaron,” he muttered, shaking his head.

“What?”

He sprinted up the stone steps, which surprised me. “I said, ‘Poor Aaron.’ It’s not going to be fun hauling all those barrels up here just to throw it all away.”

I looked him over closely. “You’re pretty fast on your feet, you know.”

“You mean, for a man my age, don’t you?” He laughed.

“Were you in the barn earlier?”

“Earlier when? I’ve been in that barn lots of times. I’m already family, remember?”

I swallowed my irritation, since it had no calories. “Earlier this afternoon. Like just a few minutes ago.”

“No. No offense, but I got bored hanging around at your place and wandered on over here. Decided to check out the root cellar—call it morbid curiosity if you will—but I had no reason to mess with the barn. Why? Is something wrong with it?”

“Very funny. Do you mind telling me why you had the cellar doors closed when you were in it? Or is this something I don’t want to know?”

“You’re a gas, Miss Yoder, you know that?”

“You may call me Ethel, then,” I said drily.

“Ha, ha. Well, if you must know, I didn’t close the doors. They fell. Nearly hit me on the head. I could have been the second corpse carried up these stairs.”

That certainly explained the thump I’d heard when I was in the barn. As for the darter—well, I would have to keep that appointment with my optometrist this year. When you have to hold the hymnbook further away than your arm can reach, your body is telling you something.

I made a dignified retreat and retraced my steps across the pasture. At least I thought I had.

“Ach, du heimer,” Freni gasped when I walked in the back door. “What is that smell?”

I glanced down to see that one of my steps had been ill-placed.

Chapter Eight

“How did lunch go over?” I asked Freni.

“Ach, that Leah! Just like a Troyer to want mustard on a tongue sandwich.”

“She was born a Miller,” I reminded her. “And what’s wrong with mustard?”

“On fruit?” she asked incredulously.

I fled the kitchen before she could tell me her rationale.

Three of the aunties were still in the dining room. However, they weren’t eating—they were quilting. I keep a quilt-in-progress stretched out on a frame in one corner of the room and allow my guests to try their hand at the craft. Actually, I encourage them to do so. Amish and Mennonite quilts, even poorly made ones, are very popular with tourists. As long as machines rule the world, “handmade” items will continue to fetch a premium.

“Everything all right?” I asked graciously.

Auntie Veronica’s nose rose and twitched a few times.

“You tell us,” Auntie Leah boomed.

“I left my shoes on the back porch,” I said quickly. “And that’s not what I was talking about.”

I caught Veronica stealing a glance at her own tiny tootsies. “Well, if you were asking about our rooms,” she said, “I’d have to say no.”

“Sorry, dear, but you’re not getting mine. We’ve already been over that,” I said for the benefit of the other two.

“You see what I mean?” she said to her sisters. She turned to me. “There has been no maid service yet today, Magdalena. Are you going to make poor little Aaron change my sheets again?”

I smiled patiently. “Of course not, dear. For the next week we’re all on the ALPO plan. You get to do your own room. And cheer up. Usually I charge extra for that, but on account of you’re family, this time I won’t.”

Veronica did not beam with gratitude. “I would have stayed in a hotel, you know, but Van Doren’s Guide to Gracious Living doesn’t list a five-star establishment for Bedford County.”

“Well!” I said. What else could I say? Robert Van Doren had not been amused by the ALPO plan, and when I shut off the hot water in the middle of one of his twenty-minute showers, he was possibly even irritated.

“I would have stayed in any hotel,” Leah barked, “except that the Bottomless Pit has drained me dry again.”

“The Bottomless Pit?” I asked politely.

Six pairs of eyes narrowed. “Family business,” Veronica hissed.

I started to leave.

“Kissed a bitch,” my namesake whimpered.

I ran that through my brain until it came out “missed a stitch.” Then I generously showed her how to rectify the problem, complimented them all, and set off in search of Auntie Lizzie, the sane one.

She wasn’t in the parlor, but all four uncles were. They were sprawled out and snoring like overslopped hogs—except that hogs don’t wear suits and ties eighteen hours a day. It surprised me to see Elias among them. I hadn’t dawdled much on the way home, and the pasture route is a lot shorter than using the lane. Still, he appeared not only to have beaten me back but to have fallen into a deep sleep as well. No doubt it had something to do with the water back in St. Louis.

I silently retraced my steps, and was just reaching for the doorknob when I felt something brush against my skirt. Actually—and it pains me to say this—it felt like something pinched me on my left buttock. I glanced behind me, and while it may have been only my imagination, it appeared to me that Uncle Rudy’s left arm was not where it had been a moment before. He, however, was still snoring as loudly, if not louder, than the others.

“Do that again, buster, and you’ll have to use your toes to help you count,” I whispered. I maintain that I am a nonviolent person, and when I closed the parlor door behind me, I put that ugly scene right out of my mind.

I found Lizzie on the front porch, in one of the white wicker rockers I put out seasonally. She had commandeered a little wicker table and was doing her nails. Frankly, I was shocked. She was the very first Mennonite I’d seen to be thus engaged. Susannah, who barely qualifies as a lapsed Presbyterian, doesn’t count.

I would have told Lizzie that nail polish drew unwanted attention to her huge hands, but she seemed glad for my company, so I curbed my tongue.

“Who or what is the Bottomless Pit?” I asked pleasantly.

Her eyes narrowed as well. “Family business, dear.”

“Well, I am practically family, aren’t I?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact you are. But you really don’t want to know any sooner than you have to. Trust me.”

I nodded. I would simply ask Freni. She would know. I could afford to switch the subject.

“Nice out here today, isn’t it?”

“I love this place,” she agreed enthusiastically.

“Thank you. I’m rather fond of it myself.”

“Of course! No, what I meant was I love Hernia. It’s so peaceful here.”

“Hernia? Is Du Bois a big city?”

She had a cultivated laugh, the kind you would expect from a woman with platinum hair. “Compared to Hernia, it is. God, I miss it here.”

I was both stunned and thrilled. I had never known a Mennonite woman—one still active in her church—who used the name of our creator casually like that in a sentence. I didn’t approve, mind you, but it excited me to think that there was another way of looking at things besides my own, and besides that of those folks who were obviously headed for hell in a hand basket. Like the Presbyterians and the Methodists.

“I’ve always wanted to travel,” I said wistfully. “This year I got to go to Farmersburg, Ohio, but that’s it. And I’ve never lived anyplace else.”

“Count your blessings.”

That was easy for her to say. She was polishing the nails on her right hand, and her left hand wasn’t even trembling. Clearly, she felt no wrong. Heaven and nail polish too! One couldn’t get any more blessed than that.

“If you like it here so much, why did you leave? Was it Uncle Manasses’s job?”

She gave me a queer look. “His job?”

“Just guessing.”

“You guessed right. Manny was a tobacco salesman. He used to travel all the time, so we could have made his base of operations anywhere. But you know how folks around here are.”

“Yup. Susannah claims that Hernia is the buckle on the Bible belt. Our cousin Sam, who owns the only food market, was picketed when he added wine vinegar to his stock.”

She laughed till she shook. “Oh, shit,” she said. “See what you made me do?”

Hopefully I hadn’t caused her to swear. Nails, I supposed, could be fixed, but Mama spinning in her coffin was a grave matter.

“Auntie Lizzie, could I ask you some personal questions?”

“Lizzie, please. And there’s no need to ask. That isn’t Manny’s real hair color. Or the color of his mustache either. When I started coloring my hair—I do, you know—Manny had to follow suit. He thought if I was going to look young, then he had to as well. Like I would step out on him!”

That wasn’t what I was going to ask, but I decided to run with it. “Forgive me if this is a painful subject, but did your sister Rebecca really run off to the Poconos with an accordion-playing preacher?”

She knocked the polish bottle over, but an oversized hand righted it again before any damage was done.

“Who told you that?”

“Heard it around,” I said. As much as Freni irritates me, I would rather put bamboo slivers under my fingernails than betray her. I’d even rather eat fried liver and mashed turnips, which says a lot.

“Well, there was an accordion player, but she sure as hell didn’t run off with him.”

“Again, I don’t mean to be rude, but how can you be so sure?”

She took her time before answering, blowing on each magnificent finger like it was a candle with a stubborn wick.

“Because, dear, it was Vonnie who had the affair with Benjamin, not Becca.”

I gulped. “Auntie Veronica?”

“Well, I can’t actually prove that they had an affair affair, if you know what I mean.”

I nodded, although it was machts-nichts to me. What did I know about the various levels of an affair? It didn’t matter, though, because Lizzie loved to talk.

“It was a terrible idea in the first place, that twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party. Aaron Senior and Catherine were never happily married. So why celebrate twenty-five years of bickering?”

“Why, indeed?”

“Because that’s what our family does. So we all dropped everything and made happy for a week. Fortunately none of us lived out of state, so it wasn’t a big financial hardship, except maybe for Vonnie and Rudy. You’d think Verona was on the moon, the way she complained.”

“I thought they lived in Fox Chapel.”

She had a cultivated chuckle. “They do now, of course, but back then they didn’t have enough change to play tiddledywinks.”

“I’ve been to Verona,” I felt compelled to say. “It’s right next to Oakmont, where Mystery Lovers Bookshop is located. Fox Chapel is on the other side of the Allegheny River.”

“Exactly. Well, Vonnie bitched for about a day or two, and then she saw this sign for a revival, and the next thing we knew, she had fallen head over heels in love with the accordion player.”

“Was he cute?”

Platinum blondes don’t always emit cultivated laughs. “He was as ugly as a mangy hound dog dead two days.”

“That bad?”

“Honey, none of us could see what she saw in him. Of course, Rudy may not be so much to look at now, but in those days he was a hell of a lot cuter than that accordion player.”

“Maybe she was having trouble with her marriage,” I said meekly. The meekness part was important. Most married folks bristle when a spinster offers an opinion on the subject.

“Yeah, well, that’s a whole book in itself.”

“Do tell. The high points, I mean.”

“You sure this won’t offend your sensibilities?”

“Positive.” At least not any more than the question itself had.

“Rudy Gerber considers himself God’s gift to women.”

“I noticed.”

“He put the squeeze on you?”

“I felt like I was an orange.”

“Welcome to the club. Unfortunately that’s not as bad as it gets.”

“So he had affair affairs?”

She looked me over casually, like I was a horse she was about to bid on. “Of course I can’t prove that he did, but everyone knows he did. Especially after they moved to Verona. From what I hear, that place is a real fleshpot.”

I felt cheated for having noticed nothing more than a quaint riverside town whose main street was lined with antique shops.

“And Rudy is a Mennonite?”

“Born and bred.” The cultivated laugh returned. “Honey, Mennonites are just like everyone else.”