Mennonites Don't Dance (2 page)

At home, he became quiet, his silence a crust growing over a wound.

“That woman,” Jonah's father finally said after three solid days of silence, the word woman spat out like a bitter taste. “How dare she talk to me like that? As though Elias deserved what he got because her rutting cattle have to shit in someone else's barn for a season. I suppose she thinks it's up to me now, but she's got a long time to sit on her fat ass if she's waiting for me to darken her doorstep.”

The next morning, an hour before the sun was up, Jonah woke to a single sharp blow to his bedroom door. He sat up straight and threw off his blanket.

“Let's go,” his father said, striking the door hard a second time. Without opening it to ask where or why, Jonah piled on his clothes. He hurried outside and picked up a heavy metal box of tools that his father pointed to, lying on the frost-covered path in front of the house. They walked, crunching over gravel and snow, Jonah behind by a few steps as he struggled with the awkward weight of his burden and shifted it from hand to hand.

“Too much for you?” Jonah's father said without looking back. It felt like an accusation, but Jonah reasoned that his father just needed time to come to terms with his loss. Before, when something had caused him to fall into one of his moods, he always struggled back to the surface for a while.

“I'm fine,” Jonah said, though his fingers were stiff and his lungs felt brittle with cold, making him desperate to stop and indulge in a fit of coughing.

“Good, because tomorrow you can get up early and do your chores before we go. Had to do the milking myself this morning.”

Jonah, to keep from falling farther behind, held his breath and ran to catch up, the toolbox throwing him off balance. He didn't drop back again and they arrived at the Martins' farm just as the sun was beginning to show. Mr. Martins was coming out of the house with a slop pail full of plate scrapings, grapefruit peels, and egg shells for his pigs. He stopped and considered Jonah and his father.

“Can't say I know what's brought you here, Abram,” he said. He gently set down the pail and the wire handle fell and chimed against the side. It felt to Jonah like an invitation to do the same, to put the toolbox by his feet, but he didn't think he could let go. His fingers were stiff as though they had frozen around the handle.

“Come to do a bit of unfinished business, is all,” Jonah's father said after a few moments, which, to Jonah, seemed eternal.

“Not your responsibility, as I see it, but you're welcome if it's what you want.” Mr. Martins looked from Jonah's father to Jonah to the unfinished barn, its undressed frame salted with beads of snow.

For a week after that, except on Sunday, Jonah got up and was busy with the milking before his father's feet hit the floor. It was still dark when he finished and even the cows seemed to know it was too early to protest with their usual fidgeting and swishes of their manure-crusted tails. When he was done, Jonah waited in the barn where it was warm enough to keep from shivering. As soon as he heard his father's feet on the gravel outside, Jonah snatched up the toolbox — his father said he didn't trust leaving it with the Martins — and was ready to walk.

Working together, Jonah and his father finished sooner than they expected, and Jonah felt satisfied to have completed his uncle's work. Pleased, too, he had done something measurable to help his father and mother. The money from the job would be useful, he was sure. Maybe they'd even celebrate by killing a chicken for supper that night.

At the Martins' door, Jonah stepped forward and knocked before retreating to stand just behind his father. Every day after they finished, Mrs. Martins had invited them in to warm up with a cup of coffee, a slice of fresh pie, or a share of whatever baking she had done during the afternoon. Every day Jonah's father refused.

“I guess we're done here,” Jonah's father said when Mrs. Martins opened the door. Jonah could smell fresh bread and imagined eating it with a thick slab of butter and a spoonful of jam. He thought his father must be wrong about her and believed that this time, because they were finished, because she was so kind, his father would accept her invitation.

“Come on in,” said Mrs. Martins. “Get yourselves out of the cold.” She opened the door wider and warm, yeasty air flowed over Jonah's face, leaving it moist, then colder than before.

“No, I don't think so. We'll just be on our way.” It had happened the same way each day, but Jonah still felt that this time would have to be different. Surely his father wouldn't keep them standing in the cold while Mrs. Martins went inside for the money.

“At least come in while I fetch you your envelope,” she said. Jonah took an involuntary step towards her, but took it back when his father didn't move.

“I won't accept that,” Jonah's father said. “It's not rightfully mine. It belongs to Elias and he's not here to take it.” He doffed his hat, a grey felt fedora, and turned round, leaving Jonah still looking at Mrs. Martins. He swallowed hard, as though a sharp stone had lodged in his throat. He was unable to tear his eyes from her until she reached back inside the house. Mrs. Martins opened the envelope and pressed a warm dollar into Jonah's hand, squeezing it in both of hers, and closed the door.

“Miserable old sow'd be sure to remind me and everyone else about her bleedin' barn until Kingdom come,” Jonah's father said after they were half a mile down the road. “Didn't deserve what we did for them.”

Jonah nodded as though he understood. A little while later, Jonah's father took the toolbox from him and carried it the rest of the way. But without the weight he'd become accustomed to it was hard for Jonah to walk straight.

“You know that disease of your uncle's runs in families,” Jonah's father said as they walked. Ever since Elias died, he'd been unable to speak the disease's name. As though it would invite the cancer in. “Means my number's up next, and you should go ahead and plan to get done what you want to get done long before you're my age. All a man can do is work hard enough, and take as little as he needs, so that the Old Bastard upstairs doesn't take notice. Then just go on and die as well as you can.”

That night, Jonah didn't sleep. He sat on his bed, uncomfortably awake, wrapped in a rough quilt that smelled of wet wool from his own cold sweat. He turned over in his mind what his father had said about hard work and reward, until he looked at it from all sides, until he believed it.

When Jonah finally lay down, he held his breath and stayed as still as he could. Thoughts of stuff going wrong inside him swooped down, veering away at the last second before he was able to catch and reason with them. He began to shiver. It wasn't until morning, when the sun glared past the edges of the heavy brocade drapes over his window, that he thought of looking for an extra, dry blanket.

Jonah dressed before his parents were up. Although it was a warmer day than those before, Jonah ached from a chill that had seeped under his skin and into his bones. He felt starved, full of holes, but had no appetite. Without breakfast, he completed his morning chores. When finished, he set off to clean the old outhouse, a weather-worn shamble of sticks his mother had lately complained wasn't fit to be used.

For an hour, Jonah scrubbed frozen fly specks from the walls and seat, swept up the bodies of insects that had died in the fall — the flies that spun on their backs until they finally succumbed, the moths that had shed the ability to eat along with their soft caterpillar bodies. He poured lye down the toilet hole and could have finished there; it would have been enough. If it were spring, he would have searched in the dark corners and between the boards for spiders — daddy-longlegs, mostly — even though they ate mosquitoes. He would have crushed them with his thumb, each one popping like a blister. Instead, he whisked away their crumbling webs and brushed them off onto his pants. By the last web, his hands were gloved in grimy spider silk.

When he was through, Jonah walked around the outhouse, and walked around it again, worrying tracks down to the frozen dirt under the snow. It was still filthy, he thought, disappointed in a way he couldn't understand. He crouched down on his heels, bowed his head under his hands and cringed at what he felt he needed to do. He thought about the boys his age that he knew were going pond skating that afternoon, maybe playing hockey if there were enough of them. For a moment, he closed his eyes and imagined the ice under his blades, the feeling of freedom. He shook his head, driving away the image.

With extra lumber that he and his father had gone back and hauled away after finishing the Martins' barn — his father said it rightfully belonged to Elias and wouldn't leave it there — Jonah began to work on building a new outhouse. He sawed and hammered wood together into a frame, sawdust and the occasional drop of blood staining the trampled snow under his feet. When the frame was up, he dressed it with plumb horizontal slats. On the inside he sanded any wood that might be touched when someone visited. He worked without rest, without water, his breath shallow and tight, as though sucking air through a paper straw. Finally, he picked up an axe and began to chop a new hole in the frozen ground. When it was deep enough, he pushed and dragged the new outhouse over top. Against the side he piled firewood, having heard that women, if there were men nearby when they came to do their business, preferred to maintain their dignity and instead carry off a few sticks for the stove. Although he couldn't believe his mother really cared either way. She was too busy trying to anticipate her husband's temper, aware of every time he looked her up and down and scowled, every time he fingered a piece of furniture and rubbed the dust between his fingers. Or sloshed stew back and forth in his bowl, trying to see whether there was anything worth eating underneath the watery surface.

Jonah stood and arched his back, muscles tightly bundled from bending over his work. In the time since he'd started, a storm front had pushed its way down from the north. Jonah could see it gaining on the horizon, feeding on the warmer air that had briefly settled over the prairie. And while he knew the storm could shift to the east and leave them be, it was a better bet to put on an extra layer of clothing and be ready for the cold.

The last thing Jonah did before the storm came was go into the old outhouse and throw the dollar Mrs. Martins had given him into the hole.

One day, late the following summer, while Jonah oiled the gravel driveway to keep down the dust, his father came outside and stopped him. He put his hand on Jonah's shoulder and exhaled, a resigned, coarse sound. Someone else might have thought he was angry, but Jonah leaned towards it as though it was a blessing.

“I'm sorry, son. It's not fair to you that your dad's such an old shit,” he said.

Jonah's heart, which had swelled a moment before, shrunk back.

“I don't think — ” Jonah said, but his father interrupted him.

“Don't need you to lie to me,” he said. “I know what I am. People are all a waste. You know that, don't you? The world'd be better off without us in it. See these grasshoppers?” He deliberately crushed a few insects with the toe of his worn-out boot. “We're more like them than we are those crows over there — at least they serve some use, cleaning up after what dies. A plague, that's what people are.” He patted Jonah on the back, sadly, as though they had reached another understanding.

After that Jonah often left his suppers half-eaten on his plate, telling his mother he didn't need more than his share. There was no room in his stomach. He had swallowed the seed of what his father said and it began to put out roots.

Three years later, when Jonah was fifteen, a letter arrived in the mail from his Aunt Ardelle, his mother's sister who lived on a farm near Brandon in Manitoba, several hours northeast of Swift Current by train. Shortly after, Jonah was sent to live with her for the summer.

“She just needs a little help keeping up, is all,” was how Jonah's mother put it. He could tell her mouth was full of words that wanted to spill out. “Your father and I agree it's a good idea,” she added, before swallowing the rest.

She avoided looking at him as she gave him the news — folding bleach-ravaged laundry into haphazard piles as she spoke — and he knew that he was being sent away. He knew, too, that it was his father who wanted him to go, even if he never said so himself. Lately he had begun to look at Jonah as though he were a debt, a reminder that he owed more to God than he had. Seeing this, Jonah's mother had thought of a way to borrow a cup of grace.

“Your father just needs some time,” Jonah's mother said. They were already at the train platform in Swift Current, and he had asked her whether it wasn't more important that he stay home and help with the farm.

“Your father feels so responsible for us,” she said. “He'll be better after a few months with less to think about. And you'll like your aunt. She's always had a soft spot for children and wasn't married long enough to have her own before her husband died. He had insurance.” Jonah's mother looked away from him, to the open door of the train car. “She just keeps a few chickens for the extra money.” She picked up Jonah's bag, handed it to him and walked away without looking back. Minutes later, the train's engine coughed a plume of black smoke and lurched forward, before easing into the straight row of tracks and gaining speed.