by Tamar Myers
“Alison,” I said sharply, “you can’t be sending folks to Herniahenge.”
“But it’s such a cool place. And anyway, I didn’t send them—I led them. They paid me ten bucks each to be the tour guide.”
When a smile and frown compete for face space, they can give the impression one desperately needs to use the bathroom. I was forced to look away from Alison, since she has told me on more than one occasion that I am full of it.
“Still, if word gets out—why, we could be overrun by tourists.” Even worse, I thought, although I did not say it, my inn could accommodate only a small percentage of the influx.
“Ya worry too much, Mom, ya know that? I said I led them there. I meant that literally. I made them all wear blindfolds and hold hands.”
My heart nearly burst with pride. I doubt if a flesh and blood daughter could have made me any happier. “How will they get back, dear?”
“I’m supposed to pick them up—but of course, Grandma Rosen wants me to eat first.” She set the pig on her bed and hopped to the window. “Holy guacamole, it’s almost dark already.”
“That it is. Look dear, you eat, and then get rid of Ida Rosen as fast as you can. In the meantime I’ll lead the troops home.”
“Thanks, Mom!” Not to be outdone, Babe squealed his gratitude as well.
I basked in the glow of combined filial and porcine love for a full minute. “Just one thing, dear,” I finally said.
She skipped back to our bed. “Yeah?”
“Ida Rosen is not your grandmother. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t refer to her as that.”
Alison exhaled so hard Babe’s ears blew back flat against his head. “Whew, that’s a relief. ‘Cause I already got me a grandma back in Minnesota, and I don’t really want another one.”
“Then why do you call her that?”
“She told me to, that’s why.”
“Well, we’ll just see about that,” I said, and turned on my narrow heels.
But Alison’s role model is not as stupid as she looks. I had no intention of speaking with Ida Rosen until after my guests were fed.
There have been recent rumors of Bigfoot prowling about Hernia and environs, but since the tales were generated by Alison and are, in fact, based on yours truly, I don’t put much stock in them. Still, I was somewhat startled to see three shadowy figures stagger out of the woods on the Herniahenge side of the road. Although I was carrying a flashlight, it wasn’t so dark that I would stumble. Therefore I decided against turning it on. One must save energy whenever one can, right?
But it is always okay to pray. “Lord, if one of them wants to breed with me, please don’t let him be too ugly.”
Immediately one of the creatures broke ranks and advanced toward me at an astonishingly fast pace. “Miss Yoder, is that you?”
The voice was unmistakenly female in timbre, so even if it was an attractive Bigfoot bearing down on me, there would be no horizontal hootchy-kootchy in the vicinity of Herniahenge. I must say I was a mite disappointed.
“Miss Yoder, it is you!” Octavia Cabot-Dodge’s assistant grabbed me by my right arm and pulled me down Hertlzer Road like I was her toy wagon. I tried to dig my heels into the asphalt, but it was a waste of good leather.
“Miss Miller,” I protested, “I’m quite capable of walking on my own.”
“Yes,” she hissed, “but we must stay ahead of them.”
“Oh, I get it. You want us to lose them—sort of like a game, right?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Miss Yoder. I have something to say to you that is a matter of life and death.”
22
“I’m all ears,” I cried. Now it was me who was pulling her. “What’s this all about?”
“Your fleecing of America.”
“I read that book!”
“I’m not talking about a book. I’m referring to all the ways you have of extorting cash from your guests. It doesn’t seem at all like the Mennonite way to me.”
I am the first to admit that I don’t fit the profile of the typical Mennonite. That doesn’t bother me. But there are areas in which I fit the mold quite well. Mennonites are supposed to be humble in their dealings with the world, and quite frankly I am proud of my humility.
“Man does not live on bread alone,” I said, quoting the Good Lord himself, and then, because I speak to Him on a daily basis, I felt free to add a few words on my own. “And woman requires meat, fruits, vegetables, and a warm, dry place to sleep. That all takes money.”
“Which my employer does not have.”
“Get out of town! I mean, I knew Miss Cabot-Dodge is a has-been, but I thought surely she’d managed to sock away some moola in her heyday, brief though it was.”
“She tries to maintain that image, but it’s getting harder and harder. Have you looked closely at the limousine?”
“No, but if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all, right?” But even I knew that wasn’t true. Colonel Custard, who had the unfortunate experience of dying in my inn recently, owned a limo, the seats of which were covered with the foreskins of stillborn whales.
“Miss Yoder, that limousine is twelve years old. It is in need of new tires. The dress my employer wore to dinner the other night—well, just between you and me, she bought that in a Hollywood thrift shop.”
“You don’t say. Well, you certainly didn’t seem to be bothered by my rates when you booked the rooms.”
“I was under orders to conduct business as usual. In the film industry image is everything. No one wants to hire a desperate actress—not one her age, at any rate.”
“You mean she plans to make another movie?”
“Can you keep a secret?”
“Are my eyes blue?”
“I don’t know, Miss Yoder. They just look dark and beady to me.”
“Well, they are blue. Yes, I can keep a secret.”
She glanced over her shoulder, but at the pace we were walking, there was no way her boss could be close enough to hear us. “Miss Cabot-Dodge is up for a part in a sitcom.”
“You mean like Green Acres? Now that was a show worth watching.”
Augusta Miller snorted, not the wisest way to express oneself on a road heavily trafficked by Amish buggies. There weren’t any Amish out and about at that hour, but had there been, we both might have found ourselves behind traces.
“My employer’s sitcom—and I have no doubt she’ll get the part—is much more sophisticated than that. It’s called Clone on the Range, and she’ll be playing a wealthy widow on a Wyoming ranch who has herself cloned. But you see, the clone—and they’re hoping to get Jennifer Aniston for the part—turns out nothing like the donor. That sounds like a winner, doesn’t it?”
“Well, frankly—”
“But the thing is, she doesn’t have the part yet. So all these extra expenses you keep coming up with are proving to be an embarrassment. She feels she has no choice but to say yes, in order to maintain her image as a star.”
“Point taken,” I said charitably. “I’ll only pretend to charge her for the extra privileges. As for you and the chauffeur—well, I’ll just say I’ve changed my policy and servants are no longer allowed to mingle with the rest of us.”
“I am hardly a servant!”
I wrenched free from talons capable of eviscerating a marble antelope. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I was headed the other way. The folks at the rocks are going to need help getting back.”
By the time I reached Herniahenge the woods were as black as Aaron Miller’s heart. Fortunately my big feet knew every twist and turn in the path. When Aaron and I were courting we—never you mind. Suffice it to say, I reached the rocks without as much as stubbing my toes. Apparently, I was pretty silent in my approach as well.
“Of course it’s a rip-off!” Bibi Norton’s voice boomed through the night air. “But Father and I were just saying that we really don’t mind paying her exorbitant prices, because of the convenient location.”
“They are not s
uch high prices,” Terri said softly. “In Japan many hotels cost this much. But Miss Yoder is so—how do you say—bossy?”
At least three people laughed. I couldn’t identify the culprits in the dark, but believe you me, I was going to pay special attention the next time we were together in a well-lit situation and someone told a joke.
“She told me the place was haunted,” Capers drawled, adding eight more syllables than were necessary. “But I still haven’t seen her grandmother’s ghost. Now, if she came to my house in Charleston, I could personally introduce her to several specters.”
“You’re joking, right?” If I hadn’t recognized Chuck Norton’s voice, I probably would have thought it was a barking dog I heard.
“Oh, no,” Buist said. “In the eighteen hundreds a pirate was hanged virtually in our front yard. He had a peg leg, but they took it away from him before they strung him up. I guess it was an early form of recycling. Anyway, we’ve seen and heard him many times. Usually in the upstairs hallway.”
“What do you mean you heard him?” Terri’s voice had risen an octave.
“When you first see him he appears out of nowhere, leaning on a cane and asking for his leg back. Keeps asking for it, in fact, until you say ‘here it is.’ Then he turns and walks away, and you can hear both the cane and his leg clumping down the hall—but you can’t see him anymore.”
“You never actually see the peg leg,” Capers said in a mere eleven syllables.
“There are many ghosts such as this?” Terri asked, now sounding properly terrified.
“They’re everywhere,” Buist said. “Walk down any street late at night, and half the people you think you see, aren’t really there. At least not in a flesh and blood way.”
“Remind me not to go to Charleston,” Chuck said, and then laughed nervously.
“Oh, that one-legged pirate likes to follow us around. Once he even showed up in our hotel room on Maui. So much for the theory that ghosts can’t travel over water.”
“I’m not saying that I don’t believe you,” Bibi blared, “but if you ask me, Miss Yoder embellishes everything. Why, just look at those brochures we got in the mail— ‘comfortable accommodations in a quaint, authentic Mennonite setting.’ Ha! It wouldn’t surprise me if those dowdy clothes she wears are just part of her act.”
That did it. If the farmer’s wife wanted to see acting, she was in for a treat. I played Brunhilde the Barbarian in a fourth-grade production, and everyone said I was a natural. I would have tried out for Ghengis Kahn in the fifth grade, but that’s the year Susannah was born, and I was forced to wash cloth nappies by hand while Mama napped.
The first thing I needed to do was to get my ungrateful guests’ attention. I did that by moaning. My brief, but bogus, marriage to Aaron had honed both my acting and moaning skills.
Terri responded first. “What was that?”
“Probably just an owl,” Buist said.
I moaned again. A long, low sound, quite unlike any owl I’ve heard. For Aaron it had been a signal that it was time to wrap things up and get the ordeal over with.
Southern owls must have their own vocabulary. “Yes, ma’am, that’s just an owl,” Buist said. “He’s probably just upset that all our talk is chasing away his prey.”
It was time to crank things up a notch. “I want my peg leg.”
“What was that?” Capers managed to spit that out in just four syllables.
Bibi grunted. “I didn’t hear anything.”
“I w-a-a-a-nt my p-e-e-e-g l-e-e-e-g.”
I think it was Terri who screamed first, but if so, she was joined a millisecond later by the other two women, and at least one of the men.
“And I want it now!” I turned the flashlight on for the first time. I held it so that the business end was pointed up at the underside of my chin. No doubt my shnoz, silhouetted as it was, resembled a peg leg—of course one that hovered well over five feet above the ground. At any rate, the screams were practically deafening now, and involved both men.
A really rude person would have laughed far longer than I did. But really polite guests wouldn’t have cursed me either. Eventually we calmed down enough to have a near civil discussion, and I informed them that I had been privy to the harsh comments about me. I’d been hurt to the quick, I said, and it would take me years of therapy to recover. There was no reason to add that the therapist’s name was Mr. Hershey and that we had been having a bittersweet relationship for decades. Before that I been just plain nuts about him.
“I am so sorry, Miss Yoder,” Terri said. In fact, she must have said it a dozen times.
I shone my flashlight in each of their faces by turn. The only one who didn’t look at least a mite chagrined was Bibi Norton. She stared placidly at me, like a cow on antidepressants—not that I’ve seen many of those, mind you. Her brown plastic barrettes glinted like an extra pair of eyes. In a childish fit of pique, I wanted to rip the doodads from her hair and fling them among the scree.
Instead I prayed for patience. Imagine my surprise when I opened my mouth and discovered my prayer had been answered.
“Here, you take this,” I said to Chuck, and handed him the flashlight. “A big strong man like you should be leading the way. Just follow this little footpath, and don’t worry about getting lost, because I won’t let you. And you others be sure to keep up right behind him—hold hands if you must. Mrs. Norton and I will bring up the rear, won’t we, dear? We have so much to talk about, both being farm women and all.”
Chuck didn’t hesitate a second. That surprised me, although I can’t say I blamed him. And once he was a couple of yards down the path, you can be sure the others fell right in behind.
Meanwhile I laid a hand gently on Bibi’s arm, just in case she bolted. If it hadn’t been for her skin temperature, I might have thought I’d grabbed hold of a steel cable. You know, a thick one, like they use on the bridges in Pittsburgh.
“Miss Yoder—”
“Oh, you’re perfectly safe with me, dear. We won’t lag far behind. Besides I thought we might use this occasion to get to know each other better.”
“But I suffer from night blindness. Miss Yoder, I could hurt myself.”
“Nonsense, dear. Here, take my hand, and follow along right behind me.”
This was, of course, a great sacrifice on my part. I eschew the custom of shaking hands, on the grounds that it is the number-one way in which the common cold is spread. And as if the mere thought of manual interdigitation wasn’t enough to give me the heebie-jeebies, her hand felt exactly like a pinecone. Perhaps it was a pinecone she’d proffered me, but if so, it seemed to be attached to an arm. I made a mental note to examine the woman closer when we got back to the inn. After all, if pirates can have peg legs, why can’t farmers’ wives have cone hands?
“Now, dear,” I said, when it seemed like we were making progress in our walking, “tell me all about yourself.”
Bibi grunted. “Not much to tell. I’m just a simple farm woman from Inman, Kansas.”
“What do you farm?”
“Mostly corn and hogs. Although Father put in a few acres of soybeans this year. Said he read in a journal that within ten years, everyone in America will have switched from cow’s milk to soybean milk.”
“That will never happen,” I assured her. “Can you imagine going to your neighbor’s house for tea, and they ask if you want lemon or beans in your brew?” She grunted again. “Don’t care for it much myself, but the small farm these days has to diversify.”
“I’m sure that’s the case. So tell me, Mrs. Norton—or should I call you Mother?” Okay, so that was wicked of me, but a gal can’t be perfect, can she?
“Mrs. Norton is fine.”
“Then Mrs. Norton it is. Tell me, dear, is this the first time you’ve been to Pennsylvania?”
“First time I’ve been west of the Mississippi.”
“That would be east, dear—but never mind. Why did you pick Hernia?”
I can’t say I p
referred her snorts over her grunts. “Why, that ad in Condonest—the one I mentioned reading when I called for reservations. Father and I never had much opportunity to travel, on account our sons are too busy with their own farms to look after ours. But now that June Bug—that’s Father’s youngest brother—has been laid off from the Kmart, we finally have the time. June Bug is just itching to prove himself on Father’s new combine, so bringing in the com won’t be a problem, and as for taking care of the hogs, well, Prissy Mae—that’s June Bug’s second wife, was raised on a hog farm over by Hutchinson. His first wife, Udmillia, lost her head in a threshing accident. Never could find it, until Horace Grubb—that’s the man who bought the hay—opened a bale to feed his horses. Anyway, Prissy Mae was Miss Hog-Calling Champion of 1983. Both she and June Bug are like children to us. They didn’t have any of their own, see, on account of Bug’s sperm never learned to swim—”
I let go of the pinecone to clap both hands over my ears.”T.M.I.!”
Perhaps it was my outcry, or the fact that I let go of her hand, but Bibi Norton was suddenly at a loss for words. That’s not to say that she was silent. She thrashed about in the bushes like a spastic sumo wrestler. If there had been any bears in the vicinity, they were now halfway to the Maryland border. I hoped they remembered to take their provisions with them.
“Mrs. Norton, dear, give me your hand.”
Groping desperately, she managed to grab my person—in a very personal spot. Had it been Susannah, no doubt Bibi would have had at least one finger bitten off. I managed to remove Bibi’s hand before we had no excuse but to progress to a first-name basis.
“So,” I said, just as smoothly as if nothing untoward had happened, “what are your impressions of Pennsylvania?”
“It’s very hilly,” she said, taking the smooth cue from me. “And there are so many trees.”
