Grandmother, Laughing

by Armin Wiebe

  Later I figured out that this Glootje Susch was the grandmother buried on the day I was born. I figured too that maybe I had been given my grandmother’s feet, because I was the only one in our family who could hold her foot still against a tickling feather. Until I married myself with Obrum Kehler, I never once texed my foot away when somebody tried to tickle it. I never tried to walk through burning ashes barefoot though, but I sometimes wondered how come my grandmother, Glootje Susch, had had to do such a thing.

  This part Willa Wiebe didn’t fit into his storytelling that day. No, he didn’t get a chance to tell about anything like that because my father argued back that Glootje Susch, his mother, hadn’t been a tsejon gypsy baby at all, that the gypsy baby story had been made up by those dark Penners who had lived in the next village, and then Willa Wiebe right away blew out a big quawlem of smoke and said that there were lots who said that the dark Penners had really been gypsies themselves before they mixed themselves in with the Flat Germans way back in the Danzig days already. And then Mumchi Willa Wiebe jumped into the story and said that her father had always figured that Glootje Susch had really been a dark Penner baby, that one of the dark Penner daughters had left the basket on the doorstep.

  Before Papuh could argue back about that, before he could tell Willa Wiebes to take their dirty talk out of his house, Willa Wiebe said, “And yeah, there were those who said that the gypsy father the dark Penners talked about had really been one of the dark Penner sons. Everybody in the village knew that they all slept in the same bed by the dark Penners.”

  Papuh stood up from his chair then and said, “Such a blood shame there isn’t in our family. A Christlijch person doesn’t talk such a schvienarie in a neighbour’s house.” Papuh talked straight like the straightest furrow he ever ploughed on his fields. I learned over the years that when Papuh spoke like that, he was seeing bull red. I think Willa Wiebe must have figured this out too because he stopped with his tongue sticking out ready to lick the cigarette that he had just finished rolling. Then from outside we heard a grülijch katzenjammer and Mariechje Wiebe ran into the house. “Muttatje, come. That Hein has Jake’s head hacked off!”

  Long after that, long after Willa Wiebes had taken their smoke and their tongues and their bleeding boy home, I asked my mother about Glootje Susch. We were in the garden picking raspberries. I was barefoot and I stepped on a sun-hot stone. “Mamuh,” I said, “is it true that Grandmother Susch could walk barefoot through hot ashes?”

  Mamuh stopped picking and said, “Meyall, wherever did you get such a thing from? Why would any woman want to try a thing like that? Don’t you ever say such a thing about your father’s mother again!”

  Sometimes I think I am an old woman who is febeizeling her brain, but I am too old to try to hide anything. I said nothing back to Mamuh. I just picked more raspberries and didn’t even eat any more. I dropped them all into the pail. Even the berry that was already in my mouth, I just let it soak in my spit like a candy. But when I got to the last raspberry bush at the end of the row, I saw by the oak trees on the end of the garden an old woman, standing barefoot, looking at me with eyes full of burning light. Only for an eyeblink I saw her, then she was gone. After Mamuh had carried her bowl of raspberries to wash off, I schlikjed myself over to the end of the garden and looked at the ground where my grandmother had stood. Two footprints were pressed in the soft garden earth. The first little toes stuck out past the big toes just like mine. I felt nothing as I saw my feet stepping on glowing ashes. Then a chill stroked the cross of my back.

  Preacher Funk had gone in to see Tien’s grandmother and Tien led me into Yelttausch Yeeatze’s machine shop. I still held the rhubarb pie in my hand. In the light from the windows I saw Obrum before I saw Tien’s brother, Tony, and Yelttausch Yeeatze’s daughter, Hilda. I saw him before I saw the lawnswing with two benches half painted red and white. He was wearing bib overalls and no shirt and he was bent over and twisted backwards, painting the underside of a board blood red. His tongue stuck out from his lips like bologna between pieces of bread and his eyes followed the paint flowing out of the brush almost like he was squeezing tears out of sore eyes. That’s when I again felt the chill air at the cross of my back.

  I wanted to run out of that machine shop.

  Then a drop of red paint leaked onto the tip of Obrum Kehler’s nose. Tien laughed, then closed her mouth, her cheeks puffed full with air. I felt a tickle in my blind intestine too, but Obrum Kehler kept moving that brush without stopping, even though the drop of paint slowly ran down between his upturned noseholes to the little trough that leads to the lips. My breath stopped while I watched to see if the paint would get to his sticking-out tongue before his brush reached the end of the board. I wondered what would frighten me more, his finishing the board first or the red paint seepering onto his tongue. For an eyeblink I saw a bare foot stepping on a glowing ember. Then Obrum Kehler’s brush reached the end of the board, and he straightened himself up and wiped the paint from under his nose with the back of his brush hand, and at the same time he smeared a red streak from his reddish eyebrow across his forehead up into his thick reddish hair.

  Then my grandmother sat up in her coffin again and laughed. At the same time Tien’s mouth burst open and her whole body shook. That tickling spot beside my blind intestine split into three pieces and tickled its way down both legs and round and round up my belly into my throat, and I was laughing, really laughing, my eyes stretched open wide like rolled-up stockings ready for feet to be shoved in, open wide, spilling over with salt water. I couldn’t blink. I just had to look at this freckled sommamolijch little man, hardly taller than I was, who was glutzing me through with eyes the colour of robin’s eggs in a nest, red paint on his nose and mixed in with the fuzz over his lip, the paintbrush still in his raised hand, the bristles leaning against the widow’s peak that already then was starting to show on the left side of his face. His eyes made me forget everything except that I was laughing, and I was scared, scared that I was laughing, scared that if I looked away the laughing would maybe stop. I didn’t want the laughing to stop, even when my side began to ache and I wondered how long my legs would hold me up.

  My backstring shivered. For an eyeblink I thought of my grandmother and my feet felt hot.

  Then Obrum Kehler’s face broke into pieces and his laugh mixed in with ours like a third voice in a trio in church after three- and four-voiced singing was allowed.

  Later, at least, it seemed like a trio to me, or maybe even a quartet or a five-voiced song, because Tony was there and Hilda too, sitting by an old sewing machine behind the lawnswing, but right then I heard only my voice laughing with Obrum Kehler’s voice, his eyes swimming in salt water like pickled robin’s eggs.

  Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the lawnswing benches moving just enough to make me feel the world was tipping. I stepped sideways and I felt the glass pie plate still in my hand tipping, and Obrum Kehler ducked forward to grab the pie before it could fall. His paintbrush smeared sticky red paint across my knuckles.

  I had to blink my eyes then and squeeze the salt tears down to cool my cheeks red as scarlet fever. Obrum Kehler lifted the tea towel from the pie and reached it to me so I could wipe my eyes. His red fingerprints stayed on the cloth and far away in my head some place I heard my mother complaining about paint stains on the tea towel. At the same time I saw myself folding it carefully and hiding it in a drawer. In another part of my head, my grandmother sat up in her coffin and laughed. I wiped my eyes and when I looked at him again, Obrum had bent his red nose down to sniff the pie.

  “Ruboaba Pei,” he said, and without lifting his nose he looked at me with those robin’s egg eyes. “Best du een Engel Mäakje?” Are you an angel girl?

  “Best du een Engel Bengel?” I said. Are you an angel boy? Then I almost fuhschlucked myself, my ears shocked at what I’d said, shocked that I had said something at all.

  Obrum Kehle
r lifted his red nose from the pie, then went down on one knee with the pie held up like a gift.

  “She is a poet and doesn’t know it,” he said in such a graveyard voice that the tickle spot beside my blind intestine wriggled through my body again and I was laughing so hard, the salt water spilled out from my eyes. I had to bend my knees to shteepa myself against the earth rocking under my feet. Then, while my knees were still soft, Obrum stood back up and, with the pie and paintbrush in one hand, he took my arm with his other hand and he swept me across the ground and led me onto the swing and he sat me down on the bench that hadn’t been painted yet. I couldn’t help myself, I was laughing so hard I felt like that lady in Tante Esther’s song on CFAM who swallowed a spider that wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her.

  Later in the night when I was trying to sleep, I couldn’t believe it that I had been sitting on a moving lawnswing in my Sunday dress beside a sommamolijch man without a shirt on—so many freckles on a man I had called Engel Bengel yet. I couldn’t believe it that such a thing had happened—only when I held up my hand in the moonshine from the upstairs window, I could see the red paint still on my knuckles even after I had tried to wash it off with lye soap. Maybe I forgot to use the little wooden scrub brush beside the washbasin behind the summer kitchen. In the dresser drawer folded inside the tea towel with the red fingerprints were two raffle tickets that Obrum Kehler traded me for that rhubarb pie I was supposed to take to Tien’s grandmother.

  The mission sale auction was in Yelttausch Yeeatze’s machinery shop. In those days the auctioneer calling out the ladies’ sewing was always a man, and for sure Yelttausch Yeeatze was the best person to do such a thing in Gutenthal, even if he went into the church maybe just one Sunday a month and some said that he would drink beer when he went to an English town. We girls in those days were young enough to believe yet everything we heard people fuscheling behind their hands, only when it came to outcalling at the mission sale auction, Yelttausch Yeeatze’s fuscheling-behind-the-hands sins weren’t very weighty because if you wanted to send as much money to missions as you could, you needed somebody who could tickle the money right out of people’s pockets into the mission sale box. That was something Preacher Funk wasn’t ever able to do, not even years later when he had married my sister, Liestje, and learned himself a little bit more about how to live in this world.

  But when Yelttausch Yeeatze held up a quilt in front of the people that the women had sewed in the circle, it was almost like the Holy Ghost was telling the men to bid high. Even my father, Sodda Sudermann, would find enough silver in his pocket to bid on things that most of the time he would call women’s junk. Sometimes he would even get caught with the highest bid and have to buy something, a pair of pillowcases or a couple of pot holders or some tea towels embroidered with flowers or robins pulling worms out of the ground. One time he bought an embroidered picture with a Bible verse on it. But somehow between the time that my father bid on the stuff and the time we got on the buggy to go home, his purchases had febeizeled themselves and we didn’t see them again until Christmas morning when we girls and Pete would creep down the stairs long even before milking time to see what the Nate Kloas had left us in the plates we had set up on the table before we went to bed.

  But with the lawnswing it was different. I mean, it’s not easy to febeizel a lawnswing for six or seven months and then put it on a Christmas plate for a Nate Kloas surprise. And then yet the Gutenthal people weren’t altogether comfortable with this lawnswing and the way it had been handled at the mission sale auction. There were those who thought the lawnswing raffle had been too worldly altogether, almost as bad as the box socials the heathen English had at Mary’s Creek Hall, where there was always a wild dance yet after. And for sure, later there were even those who hadn’t actually gone to the mission sale who fuscheled behind their hands loud enough for other people to hear that there had been a wild dance in Yelttausch Yeeatze’s machinery shed after the mission sale was over, a dance wilder than the heathens in Africa where the mission sale money was supposed to go so those Godless people could put some clothes on.

  You see, what made this lawnswing such a tongue-flapping thing in Gutenthal was that Yelttausch Yeeatze didn’t call out the bids on the swing like he did for the other stuff. Instead, people had to buy tickets for it, and then at the end of the evening Yelttausch called his daughter, Hilda, up onto the platform to reach her hand into the wooden nail barrel they had put all the tickets in. My heart clappered as I reached into my little purse for those tickets Obrum Kehler had traded for the pie. Hilda pulled a ticket from the barrel and stood up straight to fold it open. Well, I almost fainted when Hilda called out my father’s name.

  I couldn’t really believe that my own father would have won such a thing as a lawnswing. It was even harder to believe that my father would yet have bought a ticket on the swing after I had heard him grunsing about it to Preacher Funk. I think if my father hadn’t had such a strong heart, he would have died right there in the crowd, because his face got so red when Hilda called out his name that it almost matched the red boards of the swing.

  At first my father argued that it wasn’t his ticket, that it must be someone else’s ticket for sure, because he hadn’t even bought one, he didn’t believe in such things, and he clawed around in his vaumst pockets to show that he didn’t have even a ticket stub either, but when he pulled his left hand out of his pocket he was pinching a square of paper that was a ticket stub for the winning ticket. It had the same number on it as the ticket Hilda Yeeatze had pulled out of the nail barrel.

  Well, Father’s face got even redder, then quickly white, and the bump on his throat moved a few times. Then, when it seepered through to his head that he couldn’t argue himself out of this, he lifted his hand with the ticket stub and pushed himself through the people to the lawnswing. I was close enough to see how his arm trembled like poplar leaves outside a church window on a Sunday morning. When I saw that, my whole body tingled like frozen toes thawing beside a tin stove. I knew then that my father had been telling the truth. He hadn’t bought any raffle ticket for that lawnswing. And then my head started turning around, trying to gribble out who would have planted a ticket stub in my father’s pocket.

  Before the mission sale, the people didn’t actually see the lawnswing. They saw only the tickets that Obrum Kehler and his friends from the baseball team were selling. Obrum had made the tickets himself and sewed the paper through with a sewing machine with no thread in the needle to make a row of holes that made it easy to tear the ticket off from the stub where a person wrote his name on, the stub that was put into the nail barrel. The whole thing was really Obrum’s idea. He built the lawnswing and painted it too, and he got the baseball bengels going on selling tickets. The tickets were twenty-five cents each or five for a dollar. That was quite a high price in those days, but because the baseball bengels talked about it like it was something next to heaven itself, it wasn’t long before so many tickets were sold that Obrum had to borrow Mumchi Yeeatze’s sewing machine again to make more tickets. And this time he let Hilda Yeeatze help him write out the tickets with a straight pen dipped in India ink.

  But on the night of that lawnswing raffle I was worried only about who would have bought a ticket and written my father’s name on it. Who would have been able to sneak the ticket stub into his vaumst pocket?

  Papuh was very quiet on the buggy all the way home, like he was uncomfortable. Beside him Mamuh was shrugging herself on the seat, looking at him sideways with a schmuista on her lips, and a couple of times I thought I heard her humming a song. Beside me, Liestje and Pete kept fuscheling with each other about whether the lawnswing would really come to our place and who would swing on it first. I was all mixed up and just let the buggy schtooka me along, sometimes keeping my knees pinched tight together, sometimes letting them fall apart under my skirt, and the cross of my back kept going back and forth between hot and cold.

  4


  Susch

  Darpslied Elders Villa

  What I miss most now that I am old and kept alive in this place is getting up early in the morning and going outside. I always liked the light in the sky before the sun comes up, that time when the last stars get washed out and there is a silverness about the world. That’s when I liked to go outside to the beckhouse and then quietly slip the milk pails off the posts and slowly walk to the fence to let the cows into the barn and be finished the first cow before Papuh got up.