Tea with Jam and Dread (23 page)

‘I
t was a dark and stormy night,’ Joyc
e said. ‘Literally. We had just performed our last paid production – a much condensed version of
Hamlet
– in Morgantown, West Virginia. Incidentally, there were eight of us then.’

‘What happened to the other five?’ I couldn’t help myself. Besides, it was a reasonable question that needing asking.

‘
Tch, tch, tch
,’ Joyce said, and wagged a finger in my face. ‘Naughty, naughty, Miss Yoder, you promised that you wouldn’t interrupt.’

‘Give me a break,’ I moaned. ‘You look seventeen and you’re an actor, but don’t tell me that your day job is that of a grade school teacher.’

‘No ma’am, I am not a teacher and I’m twenty-five. If I act like a teacher it’s because I have twenty-six brothers and sisters, half of whom are younger than I am.’

‘Get out of town and back!’

‘Pardon me?’

‘It’s just an expression of incredulity I picked up from one of my guests. Anyway, it seems to me that having so many children is an irresponsible thing to do in this day and age, the first commandment notwithstanding.’

‘Agreed. That is why my family got their own reality television show that liberals loved to hate. It was titled:
Be Fruitful, Multiply and Deplete the Planet
. It was a very wholesome show, all about how God gave us animals to slaughter as we please – I mean, everything was created for us, and not the other way around. God says so right there in Genesis, chapter one, verse twenty-seven. We are supposed to have
dominion
, Miss Yoder. Liberals forget that.’

‘The word “dominion” just means “authority,” dear, it—’

‘Do you want to hear my tale or not?’

‘Yes,’ I said as I mimed locking my lips with a key and tossing it over my shoulder. In real life, however, I eschew mimes. In fact, I so dislike mimes that I might even overcome five hundred years of pacifist inbreeding to gently slap a mime’s face – miming it, of course.

‘So,’ Joyce said, ‘it was after the last show and we were sitting in a Morgantown bar, having a farewell drink to our careers when this well-dressed Englishman walked over to our table and introduced himself as the Earl of Grimsley-Snodgrass. He asked us if we had ever watched the masterpiece theatre show,
Downton Abbey
, which, of course, we all had, being the Anglophiles that we were. He then showed us photos of his own place, Gloomsburythorpe, which he compared to Downton Abbey.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘The only “but” is “butt out,” ma’am.’

I nodded vigorously; up and down, then from side to side.

‘Ahem, Miss Yoder, for a senior citizen, you’re acting extremely childish. If I
were
a teacher, I’d keep you after school for detention.’

I jumped to my Jeep-size feet. ‘I beg your pardon, young lady! You take that back. A senior citizen is someone who is sixty-five years of age and older, and I am only fifty!’

Joyce Toestubber smiled cruelly. ‘Oh, sit down, already; I was only yanking your chain. I know how old you are and I’ve already told you how marvellous you look. Now zip it –
please
– because this is your last chance.’

So I plopped my patooty back down on the balcony chair and prayed that God would hold my jaws tightly shut, just as shut as the angels had held the lions’ jaws shut for Daniel when he was in their den. ‘Continue,’ I said. By the way, with one’s lips pulled back, it is possible to speak any number of words without opening one’s jaws.

‘The earl came across to us as a broken man. He said that he had recently lost all of his family in an automobile accident while on a family holiday in the Scottish Highlands. I mean, that’s how he spoke: trotting out words like ‘while’ and ‘holiday’ and making it sound all English and upper-class stuffy. Although frankly, the way he pronounced some words, like ‘rally’, didn’t seem right to me. Then again, what did I know? He was the first, real live earl whom I’d ever met.

‘So anyway, after four or five drinks – that he bought – when we were all feeling pretty soused, he offered us a job impersonating his deceased family. I know, it’s kind of gruesome, but you see, he was – is – a lonely man. He’d come to the States in an effort to heal his grief. He and his wife had always been planning to come, and at first he thought he could do it alone. But it didn’t work out that way. So then, when he came to our performance and saw that we could do accents and that we were approximately the same ages as his dead loved ones, well, that’s when the idea of a substitute family hit him. The only trouble was that back in England, in real life, he had had twin sons. So poor Michael – known to you as Viscount Rupert
and
the Honourable Mr Sebastian – had to do double duty.’

Well, a gal has to do what a gal has to do, which means I couldn’t help butting in. ‘But you said that there were eight of you.’

For some reason, Joyce didn’t seem to mind this interruption. ‘Indeed, there were eight of us in the beginning, but five of our number were apparently not quite as stupid, nor as greedy, as we three. Those five immediately bowed out. George “Georgie-Porridgie,” we called him, on account of he was always kissing us girls and making us cry – he even called the earl a charlatan and a scammer. Right to his face. The earl just smiled and peered at him through his monocle like he was an insect or something. You know how he can be.’

‘I do. What made
you
take the job?’

‘His offer of five thousand dollars a week.’

‘Holy baloney! Get out of town and back!’ Those colourful phrases may not be Pennsylvania Dutch, but my former guests assured me that these words are not blasphemous.

‘You see? Believe me, Miss Yoder, that is a lot of money for a struggling actor like me.’

‘Were your parts scripted?’ I said.

‘You better believe it,’ Joyce said. ‘We had pages and pages of background material on you Mennonites, the Amish, the village of Hernia and especially you and your PennDutch Inn. We were given two weeks to memorize everything, and then we were put through these gruelling rehearsals until I had
schnitz
pies crawling out of my ears.’

‘Mm,
schnitz
pies,’ I said and licked my thin, colourless lips. ‘I can certainly think of worse things than fried apple pastries. But wait a minute! What about your conversations with the ghosts? With Great-granny Yoder and Yoko-san? Were those bogus?’

Joyce – aka Lady Celia – bit her plump, glossy lips. ‘Yup, I’m afraid so. Those were scripted as well. Come on, Miss Yoder, don’t tell me that you really believe you can converse with ghosts?’

‘With Granny Yoder’s ghost, yes,’ I said. ‘However, I have never talked with another ghost, nor do I ever wish to do so.’

‘Well, I don’t believe in ghosts, nor do I believe in life after death. And I don’t believe in magic, but I do believe that people skilled in the art of illusion can trick others and fool them into believing that a certain event took place that in all actuality never happened. Take the miracle of the Feeding of the Five Thousand in the New Testament, for instance.’

‘What about it?
’ I said, sounding perhaps a wee bit testier than I had a right to sound. I hate it when people try to disprove my faith with rationality.

‘Well, once that little boy in the story trotted out his two fish and five loaves of bread, the other 4,999 people felt guilty and brought out the food that they’d been hiding in their loose-fitting robes. You see, they hadn’t wanted to share it with their neighbours. It’s as simple as that.’

‘Pshaw,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard that explanation before and I totally discount it. If your explanation were true then the Bible would have used that story instead in order to teach the lesson of being unselfish. The same thing can be said for the story about the feeding of the four thousand people, which occurs a few pages later. That story is not as famous, and doubters like you often say that it is simply another version of the feeding of the five thousand. False, I say! False, false, false! Every word of the Bible is true, and therefore, there can’t be one story with two different versions. God does not make mistakes, and don’t you try to tell me otherwise.’

Joyce shook her pretty, youngish head. ‘Oh, Miss Yoder, you have a mind like a steel trap – one that’s been sprung.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment, dear. At least my brain won’t fall out, seeing as how my brain
is
the trap.’

‘Touché.’ She gave me an admiring, and therefore endearing smile. ‘But how would you explain the
earl
knowing about you and your Granny’s private conversations?’

My heart thumped extra loudly in my bony chest. ‘It had to be that ding-dong-dang Agnes Miller. She was obviously so enamoured of the British upper crust and that silly television program of hers, Downtown Aggie, that she sold me out. She pulled out all the stops to convince the Earl of Grimsley-Snodgrass to make the PennDutch his holiday destination. You know how the Brits love their ghosts.’

‘Miss Yoder, I hope that you are only teasing about the name of that program. In any case, it seemed to me that the discovery of the Japanese woman came as an unpleasant surprise, even to you. If that’s so, then what would explain the script that the Earl of Grimsley-Snodgrass had me memorize? The one where her ghost talks to me?’

That’s when I felt my heart do a somersault, followed by a backward flip and possibly even a few steps of sinful Latin dancing. ‘This might sound like an absurd question,’ I said, ‘but have you ever seen the Earl of Grimsley-Snodgrass without his tweed jacket and starched, high-necked shirts?’

‘Uh – yes, and yes. During those weeks in which we were learning our lines and rehearsing them endlessly, he put us up at a seedy motel. It was connected to the seedy bar where we first met him. We would rehearse in the earl’s room, which was called a garden suite. That’s because it was large enough to have an alcove containing a stained brown corduroy couch
and
a plastic
ficus
tree that was never dusted.

‘At any rate, I got to rehearsal just a few minutes early one morning and I opened the door without knocking. The earl always left it unlocked for us, you see, it being Morgantown and all, and it was broad daylight. That day, however, the Earl of Grimsley-Snodgrass was clearly running late. He had his back to the door but he was dressed only in trousers and a “wife-beater” undershirt – you know, the sleeveless kind. At first I didn’t recognize him because he had this enormous head bobbling around on the thinnest neck you have ever seen. If I drew it on paper it would look like a tennis racket. I’m not kidding. It even occurred to me that his head might just topple over, and that if I didn’t run and catch it I could be liable. You know, if it crashed to the floor and split open like a watermelon.’

She paused, so I urged her on. ‘Then what? Tell me everything!’

‘Well, he sensed me staring so he whirled around, and that melon-like head came whipping around as well, straining at the end of the finger-thick stem, and just as I was about to scream my last words, he found his voice.’

‘“You tell anyone what you saw,” he said in a kind of squeaky voice, “and you’re not getting paid.” Miss Yoder, I am not a gossiper, and I might not have said anything to anyone anyway, but there was something maniacal in the earl’s eyes. You see, he wasn’t wearing his monocle then, and his eyes were not only bulging but aiming in different directions. One of them was even rotating, if you can believe that. I’m sure that you don’t believe in aliens, Miss Yoder – not the outer space kind – but that’s what he reminded me of. Either that or a giant—’

‘Praying mantis?’ I croaked, for my throat was as dry as an Amish home’s wood-burning stove.

‘That’s right; how did you know what I was going to say?’

‘Get inside!’ I shrieked. ‘Now!’

Joyce needed no more encouragement than that. She seemed to move intuitively on my heels. I dived through the French doors, threw myself on the bed and scooped up Little Jacob, after which I clasped him to my heaving excuse for a bosom. Meanwhile, Joyce locked the French doors behind her and shoved a large oak armoire in front of them.

I had just finished locking the main door to my bedroom when we heard the thump overhead. Having grown up in this house, or an exact reproduction thereof, I am familiar with its many means of expression: moans, groans, creaks, screeches and scrabbling sounds. These noises have been traced back to tree branches, sagging timbers and various animal species such as: raccoons, squirrels, doves, pigeons, cats, bats and even a family of opossums.

‘Miss Yoder,’ Joyce whispered, ‘tell me what is going on. If I am going to be scared out of my wits I at least deserve to know why.’

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Here’s the real deal. The so-called Earl of Grimsley-Snodgrass is really a serial killer named Melvin Stoltzfus.’

‘No way!’

‘And not only that,’ I said, for I always enjoy exposition, no matter how dangerous the moment, ‘but Melvin also happens to be my half-brother, through our birth mother, Elvina Stoltzfus, who almost let her precious son kill me.’

‘You’re kidding!’

‘You poor, misplaced child,’ I said.

‘Then you’re
not
kidding! Spit it all out, Miss Yoder, because I can’t take it in dribs and drabs.’

‘OK, but hold on, toots, because it’s not a pretty picture. That murderous, maniacal, monocle-wearing mantis, Melvin, is my brother-in-law through his marriage to my baby sister, Susannah. There are those who say that she is even more eccentric than I am, based partly on her penchant for carrying around a miniature Yorkshire terrier in her brassiere. To be fair, she has currently abandoned the practice of packing a pup in her bra because she’s serving time in the big house for aiding and abetting a fugitive from justice. That is to say, she’s in prison. Oh, did I mention that, although Susannah was born to my adoptive parents, she and Melvin are my second and third cousins respectively? In other words, we’re a scary bunch.’