Mennonites Don't Dance (13 page)

“Love is love and trust is trust. Got it,” Lizbeth said, snickering. Although a stone had dropped into the pit of her stomach.

One day that summer, Lizbeth heard Lucifer and Joel talking over the fence to John, who was in the garden, weeding between the potato mounds.

“Hey, so your family's been so, um, kind and stuff, we decided we'd like to have a Bible study or something.”

John stood up slowly and, after telling Lizbeth to stay put, walked towards them, but not all the way to the fence. Lizbeth pushed her fist into her stomach to stop it from flopping. Say no, she thought. But because they'd asked to hear about God, there was no way to refuse. After supper, John picked up his Bible, told their parents where he was going, and went out the door. When he came back an hour later, he looked bleached, as though someone had pulled a plug and let all his blood drain.

“What happened over there?” Lizbeth said. She took his Bible from him, set it on the kitchen table and pulled out a chair for him.

“I want you to promise me to stay as far away from them as you can,” he said.

“Okay. But what happened? You're scaring me.”

John didn't answer.

“I'm going to get Dad.” Lizbeth turned to go, but John stopped her.

“Promise first,” he said.

“I promise.”

After they talked to John, their parents called together the whole family.

“From now on, none of you are to go near any one of those people by yourselves. And never into their house, under any circumstances. That includes your mother,” Lizbeth's father said.

“What did they do?” Matthew said, always the most protective of the brothers. He leaned forward in his seat, searching John's face for an answer. John was looking down at his hands. His whole body was shaking.

“This is not to go farther than this house,” Lizbeth's father said. He told them how when John went to the neighbours', the Heindricks boys had set up a game for him. “Bible roulette,” they called it. One of them produced a hunting rifle and aimed it at John.

“I wouldn't get any answers wrong if I were you,” the one with the rifle had said. And when John stumbled over the begats, he shot a hole in their own house, right next to John's head.

“Can't you call the police?” Lizbeth said. “They can take them to jail and we'll never have to worry.”

“We called,” her mother said, her voice unsteady.

“And?”

“The boy's parents convinced them it was an accident. They took them to town, anyway, but will probably be released before long.”

“Shouldn't we tell the rest of the village?” Matthew said.

“Right. And the pastor and elders. Have them driven out!” Lizbeth said.

“For now, no,” their father said. “The boys threatened John not to tell anyone. I think the best thing is to pray, ask God to change their hearts.”

John began to lose weight after his ordeal next door. His confident, teasing way also changed, became an effort, something Lizbeth thought he only did to keep her from noticing the dark smudges under his eyes.

Over the next several weeks, because nothing else happened, just the occasional leering gesture over the fence, things gradually slipped back into a tense version of normal. In the fall, during the days, Lucifer and Joel disappeared into the far corner of their family's acres to shoot, or were heard gunning their rusty old truck down the gravel road towards town. They'd come back, a day or two later, and Lizbeth would hear their rough laughter through the open window of her mother's kitchen.

But when their truck broke down at the beginning of winter, the tension between John and the two boys worsened. Sometimes she heard them shout taunts as John pulled up the tractor to plough snow from the driveway. Their voices were harsh, like the sound of heavy canvas being torn.

“Hey, Bible Boy!” they'd say. Once, from the kitchen window, Lizbeth saw them point their shotgun at him, Joel propping the barrel on the stump of his wrist. “Why don't you come on over here and see if you can save us.”

Lizbeth had flown out of the house into the cold, but it was already over and John walked back with her, making her promise again to stay away from them.

That night, Lizbeth sunk down on her knees in front of her bed. She fumbled with the soft rag rug she always kept by her feet, pushing it to the side until she knelt directly on the wood floor. On either side of her, her sisters were already asleep and snoring. Lizbeth began to pray.

She prayed again the next night, and the next. All winter.

By spring though, Lizbeth was distracted from her prayers when Liam Rempel, who was in her grade, started stealing looks at her in class when his teacher-father wasn't looking. And on the morning that everything changed forever, there was no prickle at the back of her neck to make her think anything might be particularly wrong. No flutter of angel's wings in the corner of Lizbeth's vision, which her Sunday school teacher once said had warned him away from a mad dog. She hadn't noticed any tension in the air. Rather, white Saskatoon-berry flowers had bloomed overnight and made the landscape look covered up with cleanliness.

“Hey, Lizzy,” John said when Lizbeth left the house that morning, carrying several of her mother's fresh
rollkuchen
wrapped in a tea towel. She'd snuck them when her mother wasn't looking, and they were still warm and smelled pleasantly greasy. “Those for me?”

“Um, no,” she said, teasing. “You can have all the ones I made. Better be quick though, before Mom gives them to the pigs.”

Lizbeth kept walking and willed John not to follow her or ask any more questions. The
rollkuchen
were for Liam. And for once, Lizbeth had stopped wondering what else there was in the world.
Rollkuchen
and a Rempel was about as Mennonite as things could get, but Liam had a knack for getting into and out of mild trouble. Like the time he left a firecracker on the wood-heating stove at school, and when it went off, stood up and soon had the class laughing with a short lesson on pacifism. Imagining a life with him made Lizbeth think that life in the village might have some potential, after all.

Lizbeth met Liam at the disused railroad tracks that ran behind an overgrown row of wild chokecherries at the back of their property. The same bushes that Lizbeth, with her mother and sisters, picked from every September for syrup and jelly.

Lizbeth and Liam walked together, at first only holding hands. It was enough to make Lizbeth feel as though her heart, which was thumping like a twitterpated rabbit, would suddenly stutter to a stop from happiness. And she was sure she'd die from guilt and joy when, Liam, humming a melody, swept her around and began to show her how to waltz.

“Hey, you're pretty good,” Liam said. “You do know this is the Devil's footwork, don't you?”

Lizbeth's ears became hot. “Yeah, well.”

“You know why Mennonites don't dance, don't you?”

“Uh-uh,” Lizbeth said, mentally kicking herself for having nothing clever to say.

“I heard my mom whispering it to a bunch of ladies once.”

“Yeah, okay. So tell me already.”

“Mennonites don't dance because it might lead to sex.” He twirled her around and when she spun to face him, she saw that his face was as red as hers. “I can't believe I said that.” He stopped and stared down at his feet. “Sorry.”

“Um. It's okay.” Lizbeth pushed her toes through the dirt. Secretly, she was already planning to re-live the moment in her imagination, turning it over and over and savouring it like a lozenge. So when the first shot rang out, Lizbeth stupidly thought it meant they'd been caught.

“Probably just a fox near the henhouse,” Liam said. When they heard the second shot, followed by a woman's scream, Lizbeth's heart became a plug in her chest. Liam grabbed her hand and pulled her towards her house. She stumbled, and couldn't move except to clutch her arms and bend forward. Her hair, which she had let down so Liam could see it looking soft and loose, fell in front of her shoulders and hid her face.

“No-no-no-no-no.” The moan seeped from her like air from a tire.

“Lizzy,” Liam said. But hearing John's pet name for her in Liam's mouth only made her feel the need to retch. No one else called her Lizzy.

“Lizzy. C'mon. We have to go.” When Lizbeth tried to run, she couldn't make her legs obey. They felt like dough and moved in all the wrong ways.

Liam stopped to look into Lizbeth's face before he turned and ran towards the sound of the shot. Alone on the crumbling tracks, Lizbeth watched him disappear.

Afterwards, Lizbeth would not remember how she got back to the house but, when she caught up with Liam, he was kneeling in her parent's garden, cradling John's body. The front of Liam's shirt was soaked through and sticking to his chest with her brother's blood, which had stopped pouring from a hole in his neck. Her mother had run back to the house to call for help that was already too late.

“He asked for you,” Liam said, his head bowed. “When I got here, he said your name.”

Lizbeth stood, stiff and still, her legs rooted to where she had stopped. Her mother and sisters came running from the house, and she watched them as though they weren't real. Her father and brothers, who heard the shot from a nearby field they'd been working, came next. One by one, they knelt around John, reaching out for his and each other's hands, and wept. Their father, his voice breaking on every word, began to pray. For strength to bear this loss, and for the souls of the boys who had killed their son and brother. Lizbeth didn't kneel with them and didn't bow her head. She continued to stand and kept her eyes open and fixed on John.

When a police officer finally came from the city, he said, “I doubt those boys'll be back, but let us know if you see them and we'll bring them in.” He folded his notebook. “We'll do what we can.”

The officer was right. The Heindricks boys never did return.

Except for the first days that followed her brother's death, the whole year that Lizbeth was fourteen was a dark blur, like looking from a window of a train at night. All the pages of the calendar had been compressed to fit into a few small squares labelled Visit from Pastor Enns 8 pm. Viewing at church 7:30. Funeral 12 noon.

When it was over, Lizbeth couldn't recall her brother's funeral the way she knew it must have happened. In the few pictures, it was a clear spring day and someone had cut the grass around the church. The smell of green would have bled freshness from the tip of each broken blade. What she saw when she closed her eyes though, was not a clear bright sky, but a heavy grey wrapping of clouds.

Inside, on the men's side of the church Lizbeth's father and brothers sat, sorrow and acceptance scrawled in a collective expression. Across the aisle, Lizbeth was surrounded by her mother and sisters, as well as aunts and the women who made it their business, Sunday or not, to attend everything going on inside God's house.

When her father and brothers carried John's coffin outside to the cemetery that lay next to the church like a garden of stone, Lizbeth felt utterly alone. As John was lowered into the hole dug for him, Lizbeth clutched a bouquet of flowers that she was supposed to throw, along with her grief, into the grave before dirt was shovelled over the top. It was as though they were planting him in the ground so he'd be ready for the heavenly harvest to come.

They buried John without Lizbeth's flowers, which were left where she stood, all torn petals and bruised stems. The mourners from the community, followed by Lizbeth's family, gradually left the gravesite. Lizbeth was the last to walk away.

At home, Lizbeth's mother and sisters quietly set out a light lunch for family that came from other villages and the Hutterite colony. As younger cousins played, looking nervously at one another, unsure of what was all right to say, Lizbeth's aunts made their rounds, offering powdery-smelling embraces along with looks of sympathy that felt, to Lizbeth, as empty as wheat husks. Uncles sat in the living room cracking whole nuts, talking intermittently about the weather and God's unknowable ways.

While everyone was busy, or simply not paying attention, Lizbeth saw her parents leave the house with a plate of food. She followed, hiding behind the skirt of a tree, as they walked up to the Heindricks' house and knocked on the door.

At first, she couldn't hear what they were saying, until Mr. and Mrs. Heindricks' voices began to rise.

“Don't need any of your pity here,” Mrs. Heindricks said, her voice pelting Lizbeth's parents like sharp stones.

“In different ways, we've both lost sons,” Lizbeth's father said. “The Lord calls his people to be compassionate and mourn with those who mourn. And to forgive.”

“Don't need your forgiveness, either. If you want us to go, we told you our price,” Mr. Heindricks said and knocked twice on the siding of his house. The words hit her father as though he'd been spat on. Lizbeth waited for him, for her mother, to turn their backs and leave. To stay and shout. Just to do anything. But they lowered their voices until Lizbeth could no longer hear. Moments later, her father reached out and shook the other man's hand.