by Armin Wiebe
So it was on the morning after the sewing circle auction sale. I don’t think I slept at all—it was a good thing that Liestje always slept like a sack of wheat fallen over or she would have been grunsing for sure about my shrugging around and rolling over every five minutes. Then, when I would start to fühlenz into sleep, I would see my laughing grandmother in her coffin or Obrum Kehler with red paint on his nose calling me Engel Mäakje—and then the birds were singing outside the open window. I schlikjed myself out of bed and pulled on my milking dress, but before I reached for my kerchief I picked up the hand mirror and saw my hair hanging down in the silvery light. All of a sudden I didn’t feel like wrapping my hair up even if I knew that I would be sorry after I had leaned my head against the side of the cow.
The grass was wet on my bare feet as I walked beside the planks laid down to the beckhouse. I stepped on dandelions still closed for the night and caught pigweed between my toes. I woke up mosquitoes that buzzed around my legs, but I didn’t let them bother me. Sparrows twirped in the sugar trees and a crow cawed somewhere in the pasture. Then, as I sat inside the dim beckhouse, I heard a far-off squeaking that didn’t sound like any bird I had heard before. Soon it sounded like the squeaking was getting closer, but I couldn’t get up to look right away and by the time I had ripped off a big enough piece of Steinbach Post, the squeaking was right in the yard already like if somebody had come from the back street of the village. I was scared to step out of the beckhouse then—I mean, who would come visiting so early in the morning? Even a neighbour wanting to borrow machinery wouldn’t come so early, and for an eyeblink I shivered in my milking dress because I too had heard some of the stories the Russlenda told about the Bolsheviks. So I pulled the rag out of the knothole that we had plugged up so Pete couldn’t look in and I peeked out with one eye. A horse was coming across the yard, pulling a manure sled with little wheels. Obrum Kehler was leading the horse, and on the sled was the red and white lawnswing my father had won at the mission sale auction.
Then I shivered for sure and almost sat back down on the big hole. What was I going to do? How could I step out of the beckhouse with Obrum Kehler right there? An Engel Mäakje couldn’t step out of a beckhouse in the silvery morning light. Or could she? Obrum had on a shirt under the bib overalls this time and a straw hat covered most of his long red hair, but even in the shadow I could see his robin’s egg eyes slowly look over the yard from one side to the other and it looked like his tongue was sticking out from his lips. His eyes started to swing back over the yard when all of a sudden they stopped. He was looking at the lilac bush at the edge of the garden. Then he led the horse toward it, pulling the lawnswing behind. Obrum was on the other side of the horse so when I figured he wouldn’t be able to see the Engel Mäakje step out of the beckhouse, I schlikjed myself out of the door and crept around the corner so I could spy on this Engel Bengel that had come so early in the morning.
Obrum stopped the horse sideways beside the lilac bush, then he walked around the lawnswing, studying to see how he would get it off. All of a sudden he turned around quickly and he looked at the beckhouse.
“Suschtje Sudermann,” he fuscheled, “come once here and help me.” Well, I almost yaupsed up a mouthful of mosquitoes when I heard that. How did he know I was there? I wanted to run back into the house and versteck myself under the bed. At the same time I wanted to step out from behind the beckhouse and shluff my bare feet through the grass and wet dandelions, slowly, like Mamuh would when Papuh called her to help with something in the barnyard. Years later, I sometimes wondered if God gave us much choice of freedom in the really important things in the world. Of course, some people would say that the flesh is weak, only if a person is honest about these things it is easy to see that it’s the brain that’s sometimes weak, but the flesh is strong. Obrum sometimes said, “You tell me how many brains you see running around after the flesh is gone.”
But I’m talking now about Obrum and the lawnswing on the manure sled with the little iron wheels. For sure I had never seen a manure sled on wheels before and later Obrum Kehler told me he had shustahed those wheels onto the sled specially for bringing the lawnswing to our place. He had worried that maybe my father wouldn’t pick his prize up himself because he too had heard what my father had said about raffles. But, of course, right then I didn’t know any of this, only I started to feel that little tickle beside my blind intestine, and I remembered my voice saying, “Best du een Engel Bengel?” and the next thing I knew I had shluffed through the wet grass and before I could worry about my milking dress or my hair hanging down, I had helped Obrum Kehler pull one end of the swing off the sled, and then, while he was lifting up the other end, I led the horse forward and pulled the sled away so he could set down the swing.
Obrum took off his hat and bowed to me like a prince or some dummheit like that and I saw a little bald spot starting by the kjriesel at the back of his head and I wondered if when he was altogether bald his scalp would be all freckles like the rest of him. I never did find that out, not even after forty-three years, because that bald spot never got any bigger. He had such a spot because he had had ringworm there when he was just a little kjnirps and so the hair never grew there again. Well, his bowing and his bald spot only gave my blind intestine a bigger tickle and then when he said, “Schuckel scheen, Suschtje Sudermann,” I started to laugh, and for sure my flesh was weak then, and my brain even weaker, as he took my hand and led me to the swing. The floor shivered as I stepped on the red boards and we just slid down together onto the same bench and when Obrum pushed at the floor to start the swing, I laughered myself so hard and so loud that tears ran down my face. Beside me, his bib overalls almost touching my milking dress, Obrum fuscheled that I shouldn’t laugh so loud because the old ones would wake up and then he fuscheled again, “Schuckel scheen, Suschtje Sudermann,” and for sure it was wonderful scheen there with the blooming lilacs smelling up our noses and the swing keeping the tickle beside my blind intestine rocking back and forth. Then we both got ice cold and our feet pushed together against the moving swing floor.
At the upstairs window Mamuh and Papuh had their noses pressed against the wire window, watching us like they thought maybe Judgement Day had come.
For a few eyeblinks I thought there would be lightning from the sky and thunder in my ears. Then Obrum Kehler slipped off the swing and, lifting his hat off his head, he called up to the window, “Ekj hab yuent dee Schuckel yebrocht. Reiz yleklijch!” I have brought you the swing. Lucky travels. And then he swung his hat back onto his head, picked up the reins, and stepped on the manure sled with wheels. He turned and looked at me with his robin’s egg eyes, then he slapped the horse with the reins and squeaked off across the yard. I sat on the swing with my eyes on his back, my foot still pushed against the swing floor. I was afraid to move, yet the tickle was still there beside my blind intestine, trying to explode from my body like a warble fly from the hide of a cow.
“Susch!” my father shouted. “The milk is leaking from the cows already!”
Well, I jumped then, almost wrecking my ankle again as I stumbled from the swing and ran for the pails upside down on the post. Still, by the time I had a good froth started in the pail, I was laughing again, my unwrapped hair pressed against the cow’s belly.
5
Susch
Darpslied Elders Villa
I’ve just thought of something. Well, it was more a taste in the mouth that I remembered, a taste of pickles, sweet pickles canned in a sealer jar. Tien’s mother made them best, I think. I asked her once to write the recipe down for me, but a recipe is maybe like the piano notes for a song, only half of the story—the cook and the piano player have to bring the other half to it—and so even with her mother’s words written down on the back of a calendar page, my sweet pickles never tasted quite the same as hers. Obrum Kehler sometimes scared me a little bit when he would say that the Bible was like that—only half of the story, and the o
ther half was what a person brought to it. That idea was almost as scary as my Bloomuhkomst.
I always liked the Bloomuhkomst in pickles. Nowadays young people say “cauliflower,” but it never means quite the same thing to me as Bloomuhkomst. Flower cabbage. A word can be like a stone dropped into a pond with one ring after another spreading over the water until the whole pond is covered with rings. A cauliflower can’t mean the same thing as Bloomuhkomst; it doesn’t sound the same and it doesn’t make quite the same picture in the head. Bloomuhkomst makes better pickles for me than cauliflower.
When I was little, I always said “Lieber Gott” for a prayer before going to bed. Yeah, “Lieber Gott” was for going to bed and “Segne Vater” before eating. “Lieber Gott, macht mich fromm, das ich in den Himmel komm.” Maybe it sounds as if old Susch has eaten too many pills again, but when I was little and I first learned to say “Lieber Gott,” I always saw Bloomuhkomst. Maybe it was the sound of “Gott” and “fromm” and “komm” that put the Bloomuhkomst into my head. Even now when I hear about God in German, I see Bloomuhkomst, though when I was small, the cauliflower was a pickle in a jar and now it is a whole head, almost snow white, growing in the garden, still wrapped up in green leaves. This Bloomuhkomst God wasn’t funny to me, for sure I didn’t know how to laugh about that when I was little. One time I even schlikjed a cauliflower pickle into my handkerchief at faspa time and hid it in my room so I could hold it while I was saying “Lieber Gott” at night. Some said God was some old man with a long beard, but to me God was always Bloomuhkomst.
The first time Obrum Kehler came to visit after he brought us the lawnswing was the day Pete brought out the jar of pickles that was mostly Bloomuhkomst. When Mamuh was canning and she ran out of cucumbers and little onions before the last jar was full, she filled it up with cauliflower, and that was the jar Pete carried up from the cellar for faspa on that particular Sunday afternoon, and to show how strong he was, he had it screwed open and the seal broken before Mamuh saw what he had done. So the pickles on the table were mostly Bloomuhkomst. What that might mean I still needed to figure out.
For sure, I felt like I had barley in my bloomers when Obrum came to the door before we had even finished washing up the dinner dishes and Papuh led him through the kitchen into the sitting room. Obrum had on his Sunday suit with his black Sunday shoes polished so shiny they blitzed like mirrors when he walked through the streak of sunshine from the window beside the stove. My thoughts bounced through my head like lightning in a thunderstorm as I wondered how come I hadn’t seen him in church in the morning. I remembered swinging with him on the lawnswing and I wondered if I would be called to sit on a hard chair to listen while Papuh talked farmyards with him. I was sure I had seen flowers in the hand that was hiding behind his vaumst as he walked by.
I couldn’t sit, I couldn’t stand, I couldn’t stay in the kitchen, I couldn’t leave to go to the beckhouse outside. I wiped the Sunday plate in my hand so long that Mamuh at last said, “Dee Shieve ess boolt so denn aus een Shelva Aupel Shahl.” The plate is soon as thin as a sliver of apple peel. Mamuh had her schmuista look in her eyes, her lips scrunched like she was trying to keep her face straight. At the same time I thought there was a scared look behind her teasing face.
I tried to hear what the men were saying, but Liestje already sat on the chair beside the clothes hooks like a cluck on a hidden nest, nodding her head like some kind of allwissent know-it-all. I could hear Papuh’s voice and then Obrum’s voice but I couldn’t make out the words and I wondered myself if Obrum would be able to make Papuh laugh. And I wondered too how come Papuh hadn’t schelled me out after he had seen me on the lawnswing with Obrum so early in the morning, barefoot and in my milking dress with my hair down yet. But nothing had been said, and for sure Pete and Liestje had been swinging lots on the lawnswing. But I was scared to go near it. I hadn’t seen Papuh near it at all and Mamuh looked it over from all sides but I hadn’t seen her sit down on it yet, and I wondered again how come Papuh had had a ticket for that swing anyways, the winning ticket yet.
Then Mamuh touched my arm and I saw I was standing there looking into the last plate without seeing anything. How ever did God figure out how to give us eyes that sometimes can be open and still not see anything? Would a Bloomuhkomst know such a thing?
“Come, Susch,” Mamuh said. I put the plate in the cupboard and hung the towel on the little washline beside the stove, remembering the red fingerprints on the towel in my drawer upstairs. I thought Mamuh would lead me into the garden to look at the carrots and the cabbage, but no, she went straight to the red and white lawnswing beside the almost bloomed out lilac bush. “Sit down, Meyall,” she said as she stepped onto the swing and sat down without looking one bit shaky on her feet. I smelled a whiff of the beckhouse as I sat down and something made me look up. Through the sugar trees beside the wooden fence along the street, I saw Preacher Funk in his long black vaumst walking away from our yard. I must have yaupsed up a mouthful of air because Mamuh turned around and saw him too. When she turned back to me her eyes looked happy and sad at the same time.
Mamuh pushed the swing with her feet. Without thinking, I pushed back. For an eyeblink I thought I was on Mamuh’s lap on the rocking chair that had been moved into the sitting room now that we children were too big to be rocked in her lap.
“Susch.” Mamuh held her breath like she was trying to find words. Her black bonnet was stuck in behind her apron, handy to put on if all of a sudden neighbours would come to visit. Her hair was still like oat straw then, not snow white like it was when she died. Mamuh’s hair was like oat straw, Liestje’s like ripe wheat, and Pete’s was so white he should maybe have had red eyes. My hair I got from my father’s side, from him and from Grandmother Glootje Susch. It was the colour of hard chairs. I got Grandmother Susch’s dark brown eyes too, the only other brown-eyed Sudermann anybody could remember. Dark hair is good until the grey starts to creep in, and that can bother a woman. It even bothered me. It is part of a woman’s dream, something the Apostle Paul could never understand. It is not only the young women today who think of things like that. Ah yes, when we are young we think we are the first to live life.
That’s how I was as Mamuh pushed her feet against the swing and I pushed back. But with her black bonnet off and her oat straw hair coming loose from the shups in the back, I maybe saw Mamuh a little bit the way she was when she wasn’t married yet. Mamuh had no wedding picture; there had been no one with a camera at the wedding. One time when Liestje was paging through the Eaton’s catalogue, she asked Mamuh if she had had a dress like the bride in the picture, and Mamuh schmuistahed herself a bit and said, “So long ago they didn’t let us use white dresses yet.”
“So what colour dress did you use?” Liestje wanted to know.
“Black,” Mamuh said, and right after, a mourning dove cooed outside the window and a shiver went up and down my backstring. Even Liestje, who usually didn’t notice such things, was quiet and didn’t ask Mamuh any more questions.
On the lawnswing Mamuh kicked the schlorruh slippers off her feet and spread her bare toes on the red and white boards. A robin with something in its mouth flew over the swing to a nest in the sugar tree beside the house. I thought of Obrum Kehler’s eyes looking out from that freckled face. I felt like my whole body was holding still, my breath, my blood, my heart. I was wondering if we would be able to get away for a whole Sunday afternoon with no more visitors and my head couldn’t decide which would be better—to have Obrum alone in the sitting room with Papuh all afternoon, or to have two or three other families come and fill up the house so that Obrum could schlikj himself outside to sit on the lawnswing with me.
“Freckles don’t wash off,” Mamuh said. I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it, I just started to laugh. Mamuh laughed with me for two, maybe three, schuckels of the swing. Then she stopped. “Susch, you don’t have to hurry yourself. When the heart doesn’t clapper a wallet he
lps nothing.” Then she said again, “Freckles don’t wash off.” And I didn’t know what to think already. Was she talking about me and Obrum Kehler, or about somebody else? Her voice had that same mourning dove sound that she had had when she talked about the black wedding dress, and all of a sudden I was looking at Mamuh’s black Sunday dress like I had never seen it before.
“Is that your wedding dress you have on?”
Mamuh looked curly-faced at me, then she started to laugh. “Meyall, after twenty years you think my wedding dress would fit me yet? Ganz gewiss, I used to be thinner than you! One good thing about a black wedding dress is that a Frümensch can wear it to church for years yet after the wedding, or at least until the children start to come. With a white wedding dress you only get to wear it once … just one time in your life … just one time.”
We schuckeled without talking. I think Mamuh closed her eyes and fell asleep. I know I was happy that no other visitors came that Sunday. Maybe God makes little things happen so that people decide to do things different from what they would have done otherwise. Anyways, we stayed on the swing and I had my eyes closed and soon the whole world was just these grey clouds floating around under my eyelids and Mamuh’s feet pushed against the swing and my feet pushed back and it got so quiet that all we heard was the squeak of the swing and then from far away we heard the four strokes of the clock in the sitting room.
I opened my eyes and Mamuh was looking her schmuista look at me through wet eyes. “Nah, Susch,” she said, “I guess we must go make that Kehler some faspa.”
Liestje was still knees up under her skirt on the listening chair. She maybe would have been good for a spy in the war. Pete was almost sent for a spy in the war but his High German wasn’t good enough. Later, Liestje told me that never once in the whole afternoon did those two men talk about me, only about Preacher Funk’s sermon, Yelttausch Yeeatze’s farming, and Obrum Kehler’s section that was still mostly prairie that hadn’t been ploughed. Papuh hadn’t even asked about Obrum’s family that had moved themselves to Mexico because they didn’t want their children to go to English school.
