Mennonites Don't Dance (12 page)

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 He had smeared it across the side of his face when he'd withdrawn his arm from the cow.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?”

“As if you'd ever let me forget,” she said. Instead of rendering the fatty pork down to kernels of meat, she had started the contents of the pan on fire. There was still a singe mark on the wall behind the stove.

“And the cream gravy. I've seen fewer lumps in tapioca pudding.”

“Haw haw. Very funny.”

Later, when John went off to finish chores, Lizbeth returned to the house in an uncharacteristically helpful mood. There were bed sheets and the girls' slips to be washed. And her mother wanted to show her how to use the new-to-them wringer-washing machine, bought off the trading post.

“Heard you had yourself a little adventure,” her mother said. She reached out and tucked a curl of hair behind Lizbeth's ear. “Now why don't we see whether you can master something you actually need to know. Be careful, the wringer will grab your arm as easily as it does a sleeve.”

Once the linens had gone through the sloshing cycle, Lizbeth helped guide the heavy, sopping fabric through the rollers. Grey rinse water sluiced back into the basin to be used as wash water for the next load. As Lizbeth watched, her mind wandered and she forgot to be cautious, nearly getting her fingers caught. Her mother snatched them away and the sheet Lizbeth was about to guide through fell to the floor with a solid, wet thump.

Lizbeth was pretty certain her mother didn't know how to use a chair. Her skirt barely brushed the seat before she popped up like a piece of toast. Even when the entire family gathered around the table for breakfast, she always thought of “just one more thing” that needed doing. The brown sugar was missing from the table, or she had to to punch the bread dough down so it could rise again and be baked before lunch.

The other women from their village clucked with approval, maybe a little envy, and said things like, “Our Mrs. Klassen works like a whole dam full of beavers.” Lizbeth thought they said dam with a little extra oomph. Probably because it wasn't possible for them to say the same syllable if it had a silent ‘n' in it. Saying dam with an ‘n' was tantamount to dropping a match in a pool of gasoline. You couldn't buy enough fire insurance for too many damns.

It was no wonder that her mother could never sit still. With Matthew still coming home to eat, she baked her way through a thousand pounds of flour a year, ground from their own grain. That was probably enough to feed one of the small mission countries they always got reports from in church. The reports came with a peg board of pictures, and Lizbeth remembered one photograph of a little black boy, looking pleased as peas, holding the severed heads of two grown men. One in each hand, by the hair. After that, Lizbeth figured the missionaries over there could probably use all the grain they could get, to keep the natives from getting hungry. She volunteered to send hers, because after the thousand pounds for the family, most of the rest of the harvest had to be sold to the farm co-op — where Mennonite wheat mixed with everyone else's, unlike themselves. Lizbeth's parents also set some aside to help poorer local families, or ones whose crops, for whatever reason, hadn't been good that year. They grew enough potatoes, too, that the kids joked about how they could end world hunger if they gave away the contents of their root cellar. Since the village was their whole world, Lizbeth didn't think it was that far from the truth.

“Come, Lizbeth. You can help me take these clothes back to the neighbours,” her mother said. As one of their deliberate acts of kindness, they'd spent part of the afternoon washing and wringing the neighbours' clothes through their machine, and now the clean laundry needed to be returned next door and pinned on a sagging clothesline that spent more time as a perch for birds to shit from (it was okay to say shit but not damn, because anyone who kept cows knew that shit was just a fact of life).

Lizbeth couldn't stand their neighbours. The way they glanced over the fence as though any member of Lizbeth's family might, at any moment, attack them with the gospel, pelt them with Bible verses. When, in fact, all they ever did was give them potatoes and get their hands filthy trying to help them with their disgusting washing. Potatoes and laundry, it appeared, were as good a way as any to the soul.

Lizbeth didn't see the point. Not when the Heindricks were supposedly Mennonites, too, which meant they should be just as equipped to climb heaven's ladder as anyone else they knew. They should be able to fend for themselves. After all, it was their own fault they did things like keep guns and drink alcohol and that they never did anything kind for anyone. And as any Mennonite with half a wit knew, doing something bad at the same time as not doing something good meant you were moving in the wrong direction twice as fast.

“Don't we have enough of our own washing to do without having to muck around in theirs? Who knows where this has been,” Lizbeth said, picking up a stiffened brown sock that they'd missed. She knew the neighbours' sons from school and, while she shared some of their finer views, that the village needed a movie theatre and a couple of stores, she wasn't impressed with them one bit. If anything, they hated the village in a way that made her want to defend everything about it.

The oldest of the Heindricks boys was named Luke and was John's age. Everyone at school called him Lucifer to keep from mixing him up with Lizbeth's third oldest brother. The other boy, Joel, was the same age as her. Both of the boys had dropped out after the sixth grade after Joel lost a hand in a freak threshing accident. Lizbeth thought it was just as well — not about the hand, of course. Just that more school for them would be like throwing pearls in the slop pail. Arithmetic wasn't going to make them become less creepy, either. They prowled around their family's five acres, shooting gophers in the face, laughing as though they'd done something clever.

Lizbeth rolled her eyes and called them
dummkopf
s behind their backs, but the truth was, she was afraid of them.

“I don't even want to know what kind of blood that was on their overalls,” Lizbeth said, trying one last time to irritate her mother into letting her off the hook. “Probably all the gophers they ate for supper.”

“Lizbeth, that's enough. I know it doesn't seem like it, but when we serve people with our hands, we serve them with our hearts. It can change them. And even if it doesn't — ” She left the thought trailing and Lizbeth resisted the urge to tug and see if she could make it unravel.

She sighed as profoundly as she could, picked up a heavy basket of still-damp clothes and followed her mother out of their house and into the yard towards the neighbours.

“Been waitin' on these,” Mrs. Heindricks said. She had come out of her house to meet them and closed the door behind her before Lizbeth or her mother could see inside. “Doesn't seem to me that your fancy machine takes any less time than a washboard and a determined pair of hands. And Lord knows you've got enough hands over there.”

Lizbeth wondered how her mother managed to look so genuine. She was sure her own face had the word YUCK written all over it.

To Lizbeth's horror, her mother said, “Mr. Klassen asked me to say that he can use some extra help with the seeding this year, if your boys would like the work.” Lizbeth pulled her head back, as though someone had grabbed her hair from behind. She screwed her eyebrows together, but her eyes widened in alarm when the two Heindricks boys suddenly came round the side of the house, startling her so that she nearly dropped her basket. One of them laughed, a cruel-sounding noise that came out his nose. He nudged his brother and said something Lizbeth couldn't quite hear — about working her over. She blushed down to her toes and felt she wanted to put on a fourth layer of clothes. Seeing the boys, Lizbeth's mother quickly stepped in front of her, and Lizbeth was surprised at how grateful, how safe she felt standing in that protective shadow.

“I wish we could just leave them be,” Lizbeth said. It was a few days later and she and John had taken one of their mother's rhubarb-and-crabapple pies next door, and they had accepted it without so much as a mutter of thanks. “If you ask me, they wouldn't like it in heaven, anyway.”

“It's not up to us. And God doesn't play favourites, Lizzy.”

“He does so. He loved Jacob and hated Esau,” she said with satisfaction.

“Well, still, it's not up to us to decide for someone else.” He nudged Lizbeth off-balance and smiled, so quickly that it looked as though something else, shadowy, had moved across his features. “I think you should be careful, though.” He was quiet for a moment, holding his thoughts. “Lizzy, listen to me, okay? God never said we have to trust our neighbours. Love is not the same thing as trust.”