Tamar Myers

by As the World Churns (lit)

  “You already know that I do.”

  “But you gotta say it.”

  “Enough with the games, Magdalena. The English will have a cold breakfast.”

  I squeezed harder. I was rather enjoying myself. It’s not every day that a five-foot, ten-inch python devours a stubby Amish woman in Hernia, Pennsylvania.

  “Unh.”

  “Say it, dear.”

  “Ah unh ooh.”

  “Close enough.”

  Since, in my humble opinion, nothing says loving better than a good whiff of cow manure, after releasing Freni from my death grip, I headed out to the barn. It is no ordinary barn, believe you me.

  I got married the first time in that barn. I also discovered a body in that barn, pinned to an upright beam by a pitchfork. I have happier memories as well: as a girl I discovered litter after litter of adorable kittens that had been birthed in its hayloft; I learned that Beverly Neuhauser didn’t wear panties, Christian or otherwise; and it was impressed on me, quite literally, that Isaac Newton was quite right about gravity. The last was a happy memory because the entire week following my bungled attempt to fly (mop heads are no substitute for proper wings), I was every bit as pampered as one of Marie Antoinette’s pooches.

  If two cows are capable of pleasantly stimulating my olfactory senses, imagine what a small herd can do! So entranced was I by the Essence of Holstein that I plumb, and quite shamefully, had momentarily forgotten the previous night’s horrible tragedy. When I saw Doc’s handwriting, scrawled in blood across the broad door, I nearly fainted. Who could have done such a thing to an eighty-some-year-old man?

  While I waited for the lightheadedness to pass, I closed my eyes and prayed for Doc’s recovery. Had it been permissible to pray for the slow torture of his assailants, I probably would have done so. (It was my non-Mennonite blood doing the thinking, I assure you.) Then, because Chief Chris is a good man, but still relatively inexperienced, I prayed for the wisdom and strength I was going to need to find Doc’s assailant and bring him, or her, to justice.

  “Magdalena, are you okay?”

  I jumped so high that my left foot literally came out of its brogan. Jamming it back in, I plastered a smile across my comely face.

  “Mose! Where did you come from?”

  Freni’s dear husband is seventy-five, but is every bit as fit as a man nine tenths his age. When Papa was alive and kept an active dairy herd, Mose worked for him full time. Now he looks after my two cows and helps out with maintenance. He does not, however, keep regular hours.

  “I wanted to see the English cows.”

  “And?”

  “Never have I seen such beautiful Holsteins.”

  “Were you here at milking time?” Dairy dilettantes are sometimes surprised to learn that cows must be milked twice a day, every day, come rain or high fevers, and that the morning milking usually takes place at a time most folks would prefer to be snoozing. I personally don’t rise at that hour, so I’ve hired a nearby Amish boy to do the job. And just for the record, I would sooner accuse myself of assaulting Doc than I would accuse Seth.

  “Yah, because this I must see. With such machines, Magdalena, I think it is possible to get milk from a rock.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. As much work as it was, Papa had eschewed electric milking machines for the true hands-on approach. He thought the cows responded to his warm touch by producing more milk, and with a higher butterfat content.

  “So you think these cows deserve to be in this contest?”

  Mose bit his lip as he appeared to think this over.

  “What is it?” I demanded. “I know you and Freni aren’t too keen on contests, but there’s more to that here, isn’t there?”

  “Ach, Magdalena, I cannot tell a lie.”

  We’d been having this conversation in the barn, next to Doc’s bloody message. I beckoned Mose into the bright, rejuvenating sunshine of a perfect April morning.

  “Okay, Mose, out with it.”

  He glanced around, perhaps looking for the Devil. “They are all beautiful cows, yah? But except for one, I think. This one is- ach, but I must say this-ordinary?”

  “Ordinary?” Mose would not knowingly bad-mouth a flea. To hear him use such harsh language about a cow shocked me to the tips of my stocking-clad toes. I reeled like a drunk woman.

  Had I been wearing dentures, I might well have stepped on them. Fortunately, my real chompers are in tip-top condition, thanks to all the milk Mama made me drink as a girl.

  He nodded. “It is not a bad cow; I myself have such animals. But there are many wrinkles on the bag, and it is smaller than the average.”

  “Show me.”

  Mose led me around to a pen on the north side of the barn. It was the enclosure picked by the Dorfman brothers. Although I’d seen and admired their cows the day before, armed with Mose’s information, I saw them now with new eyes. One of the Holsteins was still a beauty, but indeed, the other was, well, ordinary. She certainly wasn’t worth toting all the way from North Dakota.

  “So now you see.”

  “For sure. What gives?”

  “Gives?”

  “What are the owners of this cow up to?” Mose shrugged. “The ways of the English are like piddles, yah?”

  “Piddles?”

  “Games for the mind.”

  “Ah, you must mean ‘riddles.’ “

  “Forgive me, Magdalena, but I think the correct word is ‘piddles.’ “

  It was time to stop yanking his chain, as Susannah would say. “Did you say anything to the Dorfman brothers about their inferior entry?”

  “Ach, no, it is not my business.”

  “Good man. Leave it to me; I’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  “Be careful, yah?” His look of concern was heartening. “I will, indeed.”

  “But this time, really careful. Not like the other times.”

  “Mose, just because I’ve been thrown down a mine shaft, left trussed in a burning house, ordered to jump out of an airplane, and even carted off to the wilds of Maryland, is not to say that I’m a careless woman. Au contraire; the very fact that I’ve survived these many and varied attempts on my life is proof that I am skilled at extracting myself from the very jaws of the Grim Reaper. Or would that be Reaperess? Then again, if we are to eliminate sexism from language, we cannot automatically assign gender to an entity that lacks a corporal being. But if we do, is not turnabout fair play? I mean, what’s good for the gander is good for the goose, and vice versa.”

  Mose sighed deeply, and by doing so, informed me that he, for one, had not shied away from the scrapple at breakfast. “Again with the piddles. But I was thinking, yah?”

  “As we all must from time to time.”

  “Perhaps it is more like the wooden duck.”

  “In that case me thinkest thou meanest the Trojan horse.”

  Mose scowled. It was the first time I’d ever seen him angry, and I immediately felt guilty. Me and my big mouth. But really, when you think about it, my flapping lips have got to be inherited from whomever birthed me, and so are not really my fault. Perhaps the woman from whose loins I slithered was a carnival caller. That would certainly explain a great deal.

  “Magdalena, I do not speak of horses, but the ducks that hunters set on our ponds.”

  “Ah, decoys!”

  “Yah, the same. I think perhaps the not so good cow has been brought all this way from North Dakota so that we do not look so closely at the good cow.”

  This time, I chewed my cud before speaking. “Yes, but this competition is supposed to be at a high level. Surely the Dorfman twins don’t think they can win with an entry that doesn’t meet objective criteria.”

  “Is it possible they do not intend to win, only to sell the cow?”

  “Ha! An interesting theory. But you would think they could find a buyer back home for the buxom bovine.”

  “Not for this baby,” a voice behind me said.

  I whirled, and found myself
staring down into the flyaway eyebrows of Harmon Dorfman.

  12

  “Howdy-do, Miss Yoder,” Harmon said, and tipped a straw hat.

  He grinned.

  “I’ll let you know when my heart stops racing.”

  “And you must be an aye-mish man,” Harmon said and extended a beefy paw to Mose.

  “Yah, I am Amish.”

  “We have youse in North Dakota too. Best-looking farms I ever seen. Same thing here. Tell me, how many bushels of corn do youse get to an acre?”

  “Okay, it’s stopped racing,” I said. “Do you often sneak up on people?”

  “No, ma’am. Of course, I don’t get me much chance, on account of Harry and I don’t get out very much.”

  “I thought your brother was married.”

  “Oh he is, but she run back to her family after two weeks. So far he ain’t seen fit to go after her.”

  “How long has it been?”

  “Five years come July.”

  Mose shook his head in bewilderment. Although he’s had to interact with us English his entire adult life, he still finds our ways strange. Funny, but I used to exclude myself from the category English, coming as I did from a Mennonite family that descended from Amish forebears. But that was then and this is now, as my pseudo-stepdaughter, Alison, says.

  Now that I was no longer of the blood, but the unwanted offspring of a carnival caller-hmm, my biological mama might not have been the caller. She could just as well have been the bearded lady, or the amazing snake woman. What’s more, short of a DNA test, I had no proof who my papa was either. For all I knew, he could have been a count from Liechtenstein who’d done the extracurricular mattress mambo with a housemaid, who then handed me off to a passing carnival. Did that, perchance, make me a countess?

  “Miss Yoder? Miss Yoder! Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine as the bearded lady’s nose hair, and you may call me Countess Yoder-Rosen of Liechtenstein.”

  “Ach,” Mose said. The poor man was, however, used to my flights of fancy.

  “Miss Yoder, if you don’t mind me saying, you’re a hoot.”

  “Owl accept that as a compliment. Tell me, Mr. Dorfman, why have you hauled this unremarkable cow all the way from North Dakota?”

  “Because Cindy Sue-that’s her name-ain’t unremarkable, on account of the other one, Cora Beth, is her clone.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Youse know what a clone is, Miss Yoder, right?”

  “I read newspapers, Mr. Dorfman, as well as the Bible.” A clone! Perhaps that applied to me. Okay, so scientists had yet to clone a human forty-eight years ago-at least not one that we know of-but it was possible the government had been working on it secretly. After all, if we really knew everything that the government has been up to, it would boggle our minds to the point that we’d all go insane.

  And if I was a clone, that would go a long way to explain the feeling I’ve always had that somewhere there is an identical twin just waiting to be reunited with me. But even if scientists could clone the human body, what about the soul? Would the new person have one? If not, would they still be human, or just look like one? And if the soul could be cloned, and the original person was “saved,” would the clone be saved as well? What if the pope was cloned, and his clone disagreed with him on theological issues? Who would be infallible?

  “You sure don’t look very well, Miss Yoder.”

  “Yah,” Mose said. “Magdalena, I think maybe you should sit down.”

  “Sitting is for wusses. Continue, dear, with this cloning gibberish.”

  “It’s not gibberish. You see, Harry has himself a biology degree from the University of North Dakota. When all this cloning stuff started happening, he took special notice, and studied up on it. Then one day, he and some of his buddies decided to try and clone a Holstein. The rest, as they say, is historic.”

  “That would be ‘history,’ dear.”

  “That’s what I’m telling youse.”

  “Then why haven’t I heard about it before now?”

  “ ’Cause it’s top secret, on account of this time the clone-that would be Cora Beth-turned out better than the original. I mean, see for yourself.”

  “I see an exceptional cow and an average one. How am I supposed to tell which is which?”

  “Um-well, I guess youse is gonna have to trust me on that one, Miss Yoder. But I don’t got no reason to lie to you. Anyway, as soon as word of this gets out, they’ll likely be a million scientists clamoring to test this baby. They’ll be lots of folks wanting to buy her too. At top dollar.”

  “So that’s why you brought her all this way? To create a media sensation at my Holstein competition?”

  “With all due respect, ma’am, I didn’t know it was your competition.”

  “You know what I mean, and there’ll be nothing of the kind. This is an event the sole purpose of which is to select America’s best dairy cow; this is not a circus. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, ma’am. But could I bring my own reporter?”

  “No clone, no press announcement.”

  “But Miss Yoder-”

  “Is this a legitimate question?” But it was Mose’s hand that popped up. “Yah, Magdalena, I have a question.”

  “Yes, Mose?”

  “What does it mean, this clone?”

  “It means-well, in a nutshell it means that scientists are trying to play God, and that in this case in particular, Harry and his buddies were able to take a microscopic piece of so-so Cindy Sue and turn it into the breathtaking Cora Beth.”

  “Ach! Like at creation?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Get behind me, Satan,” Mose said, and wisely fled the scene. “Just so you know,” I said to Harmon Dorfman, “if fire and brimstone rain down on my farm, you’ll have to reimburse me.”

  Hernia, Pennsylvania, is a charming little town-or so I’ve heard-set, as it is, in a valley between two wooded mountain ridges in southern Pennsylvania. It’s a nice place to live, but I wouldn’t want to visit. After one has spent several hours staring at its inhabitants, there is nothing else for tourists to do. We have no movie theaters, no shopping malls, just a feed store and a dismal little grocery that sells outrageously priced products bearing expiration dates written in ancient Phoenician. The last is only a slight exaggeration.

  We are a simple people, and although we tend to be conservative, we do not vote for the shedding of blood. Yes, we do have Baptists and Methodists in our midst, but for the most part they have been tempered by their proximity to folks of the Amish and Mennonite faiths, both of which abide by pacifist principles.

  Many people think that Mennonite and Amish are interchangeable terms, but they most certainly are not. The Mennonite Church began in the 1500s and was named after Menno Simons. A century later, the Amish Church, under the leadership of Jakob Ammann, broke away from the Mennonite Church, claiming it was too liberal. Both churches have undergone many changes over the centuries, but their relative differences remain.

  The First Mennonite Church is the most liberal branch of the Plain People in Hernia and its environs. The most conservative is the Old Order Amish Church. Its members are the ones seen riding horses and buggies. Then there are the Black Bumper Amish, who are allowed to drive black cars just as long as the chrome is painted black. I belong to a conservative branch of the Mennonite Church, the one to which the Good Lord would belong if he were living on earth today. I drive and use electricity, but dress conservatively, like the Good Lord intended, and wear my braids neatly tucked beneath a white organza prayer cap. For the record, I do not consider myself better than anyone else in Hernia, not even the Presbyterians. I believe that in Heaven, we will all be together-except for some Baptists, who will have their own neighborhood.

  Oops, I may have fibbed: try as I might, I can’t help feeling that I am a little bit better than Samuel Nevin Yoder, the owner of Yoder’s Corner Market. Sam is-or at least was, until certain recent disclosur
es-a first cousin of mine. We are the same age, which means I sat in front of him all through grammar school. Not only did Sam dip my braids in the inkwell on his desk, he often sat on my lunch bag, regularly passed gas loudly before pointing to me, and on at least three occasions clapped the chalk-filled erasers on my ears. It wasn’t until high school that I learned that Sam had done all these things because of a crush on me.

  As early as our sophomore year in high school, Sam proposed marriage, urging me to elope with him to South Carolina, where kinship and age were both less of an issue. I hotly refused. In the intervening decades, Sam married a Methodist woman, Dorothy, and even became a Methodist himself, but his crush on me has never waned.