The last thing Jonah did before the storm came was go into the old outhouse and throw the dollar Mrs. Martins had given him into the hole.
One day, late the following summer, while Jonah oiled the gravel driveway to keep down the dust, his father came outside and stopped him. He put his hand on Jonah’s shoulder and exhaled, a resigned, coarse sound. Someone else might have thought he was angry, but Jonah leaned towards it as though it was a blessing.
“I’m sorry, son. It’s not fair to you that your dad’s such an old shit,” he said.
Jonah’s heart, which had swelled a moment before, shrunk back.
“I don’t think — ” Jonah said, but his father interrupted him.
“Don’t need you to lie to me,” he said. “I know what I am. People are all a waste. You know that, don’t you? The world’d be better off without us in it. See these grasshoppers?” He deliberately crushed a few insects with the toe of his worn-out boot. “We’re more like them than we are those crows over there — at least they serve some use, cleaning up after what dies. A plague, that’s what people are.” He patted Jonah on the back, sadly, as though they had reached another understanding.
After that Jonah often left his suppers half-eaten on his plate, telling his mother he didn’t need more than his share. There was no room in his stomach. He had swallowed the seed of what his father said and it began to put out roots.
Three years later, when Jonah was fifteen, a letter arrived in the mail from his Aunt Ardelle, his mother’s sister who lived on a farm near Brandon in Manitoba, several hours northeast of Swift Current by train. Shortly after, Jonah was sent to live with her for the summer.
“She just needs a little help keeping up, is all,” was how Jonah’s mother put it. He could tell her mouth was full of words that wanted to spill out. “Your father and I agree it’s a good idea,” she added, before swallowing the rest.
She avoided looking at him as she gave him the news — folding bleach-ravaged laundry into haphazard piles as she spoke — and he knew that he was being sent away. He knew, too, that it was his father who wanted him to go, even if he never said so himself. Lately he had begun to look at Jonah as though he were a debt, a reminder that he owed more to God than he had. Seeing this, Jonah’s mother had thought of a way to borrow a cup of grace.
“Your father just needs some time,” Jonah’s mother said. They were already at the train platform in Swift Current, and he had asked her whether it wasn’t more important that he stay home and help with the farm.
“Your father feels so responsible for us,” she said. “He’ll be better after a few months with less to think about. And you’ll like your aunt. She’s always had a soft spot for children and wasn’t married long enough to have her own before her husband died. He had insurance.” Jonah’s mother looked away from him, to the open door of the train car. “She just keeps a few chickens for the extra money.” She picked up Jonah’s bag, handed it to him and walked away without looking back. Minutes later, the train’s engine coughed a plume of black smoke and lurched forward, before easing into the straight row of tracks and gaining speed.
Jonah thought about his mother and Aunt Ardelle most of the way to Brandon, and decided there was no other possible way for his aunt to be other than thick in the middle and the ankles. When she’d wear one of her spongy polyester dresses — which his mother wore like a uniform — she would look as though she was upholstered. Like a chesterfield whose stuffing had shifted.
So when an evenly plump and merry-looking woman in a sensible but flower-printed cotton dress came towards him at the train station, he didn’t know it was Ardelle until she clasped her hands and called out his name. Still, he thought it must be a mistake.
“Well, aren’t you just the image of your old dad?” She laughed as she pulled him into a hearty embrace that smelled of cream gravy and farmer’s sausage. “No matter, though,” she said, taking Jonah by the shoulders to have a better look. “Nothing’s fixed until you’re in the ground. And I’ve got you for a summer to myself. No telling what we can do with you in that time.”
The room Jonah’s aunt had prepared for him was white and cool with crisp, light linens and goose-down pillows on a narrow, plush bed. There was a soft rag rug on the floor. The air smelled of line-dried laundry. Sunshine, but not the way he thought of it at home. At home, when the sun seeped in through his mother’s curtains, it was the colour of urine, dry as dust.
Jonah sat on the edge of a chair arranged under the window and wondered what to do next. Ardelle had instructed him to rest until she called him for supper. “Have a little lie-down until you get your land legs back underneath you.” Jonah had to admit that it was a good idea. He felt a little strange, as though the ground were still moving under his feet and his body swaying slightly from side to side like the train.
With nothing to distract him, Jonah had time to consider how he must look to his aunt.
Even though every stitch his mother had sent him in was painstakingly clean, he was self-conscious of his trousers, which were thinning at the knees and left too many inches of sock showing below the hem. He had grown in the last year, and it wasn’t that his parents couldn’t afford the few things that were most needed. It was that his father saw no point. Jonah would just grow out of the next pair of pants, too.
At supper, Jonah was hungrier than he could ever remember. Although he’d done nothing but sit the whole day, his stomach felt deep and unfillable, as though it had expanded since the last time he ate.
“Didn’t ask your mother what you like, so I’ve made a bit of everything.” Ardelle put down the dish she’d been carrying and lifted the lid, letting a cloud of steam rise into the air. “The baby potatoes with cream and dill’s my favourite, if you want to know. New potatoes from the garden, just this morning. My husband used to say that if you put them next to some of that roast beef or the farmer’s sausage, no man’d ever want to leave my kitchen.”
Jonah was unsure whether he should say something consoling, or something complimentary about the food. Or both.
“I’m sure he was right,” he said, hoping it was appropriate.
“He usually was, except for when he wasn’t,” Ardelle said, laughing. Jonah pinched his lips together and bit them. It wasn’t his place to joke.
Jonah took small helpings of the potatoes and beef, which Ardelle quickly doubled. After that, she passed him one casserole dish after another. It didn’t seem right to refuse and, by the last dish, the fullness of his plate made him blush.
“That’s cassoulet,” Ardelle said when Jonah tapped a spoonful of something with green beans onto his plate. “I’m known for it when we old church ladies have a potluck. Silly old ducks, most of them. The Lord and I know half of them could use a stiff shot of vanilla now and again.”
In bed that night, surrounded by fresh linens, Jonah thought about home. His mother would be snoring, seeming to sleep as fast as she could to make up for how little time there was before breakfast, chores. His father, beside her, always lay flat on his back with his arms at his side, dead silent. When Jonah was little, he used to creep into their room to watch for the rise and fall of his father’s chest, before sneaking back to his own bed. Until now, he had never slept anywhere else.
During the days at his aunt’s, there was barely enough work for Jonah to keep himself busy, and Ardelle seldom asked him to do anything specific. He spent his first weeks with her looking for extra chores that needed doing. Ardelle was unfussy but efficient, and paid a pair of young neighbour boys to help her with things she couldn’t manage. Early in the mornings Jonah went with her to collect eggs from the henhouse, reached under the bellies of hens. They walked from house to house in the village to sell the eggs. He had a feeling though, that he was just along for a little fresh air and exercise. That, and Ardelle seemed to enjoy introducing him.
“Here, you can take this out to the barn,” she said one morning when Jonah came into the kitchen, still muzzy with having overslep
t. She was cracking and whisking the last of the day-old eggs into a pail of fresh, warm milk. The pail was only half full; the rest Ardelle had poured off into bottles.
“You don’t have cows,” he said, peering into the pail of milk with its swirls of bright yellow yolk.
“No, but the neighbours do,” Ardelle said in a teasing way.
“Now, there are three tin dishes right where you first go into the barn. Pour milk in all of them, but more in the one with the red rim. Wait until they’re done, then bring me back the pail and the dishes to wash.” She handed him three stale buns and instructed him to break them into pieces and pour the yolky milk over top.
Outside, the morning light was thin and grey, as though it had been steeped with Earl Grey tea, obscuring the outbuildings across the yard. Jonah could tell that the day would be warm, although there was a lightness in the air that he hadn’t noticed before. The milk sloshed slightly in the pail. He had carried thousands of pails of milk in his fifteen years, but never any of them fortified with eggs. Of course the strange combination must be for his aunt’s cats. Since arriving, Jonah had seen them around her property — black and white ones, mostly, with glossy fur that reminded him of men’s church shoes. Back home any cats without enough sense to find someone else’s barn were expected to fend for themselves. They were dull and tatty about the ears, with inflamed, mucousy eyes and sometimes bent tails that had been broken under the foot of a cow. In their hayloft Jonah sometimes found emaciated kittens, half-eaten by their mothers.
A few of his aunt’s cats, ones that waited expectantly at the door to the house every morning, stood up, stretched and followed Jonah to the barn. They wound around his legs and made throaty, purring meowing sounds when he stopped to lift the pitted iron latch and open the wooden door, its grain dry and split by weather and age. On the other side there were more cats and kittens — Jonah counted thirty-one in all, including an enormous feathery-furred tom, which presided over the red-rimmed dish. The rest sat around the other dishes, as though they were diners waiting to be served.
“We had a dog for a while,” Jonah said one morning when he’d been with his aunt for more than a month. Ardelle looked up from the pot of oatmeal she was stirring and he saw that she quickly hid a look of surprise.
“A dog,” she repeated. A nudge to go on.
“A little one, I don’t know what kind it was. A Heinz 57, I guess. I remember once, we were having sausages for supper. She wanted one something terrible, but Dad had taught her to sit still or get walloped.”
Ardelle put her pot to the back of the stove and turned to give him her full attention. She seemed to sense that Jonah was about to falter.
“Anyway.” Jonah swallowed. “I could see that she was trying to get close, but she was moving so slow that Dad didn’t see her until she was all the way to the table. She jumped up and snatched the sausage from his plate and ran off. Dad got up and they chased each other around and around the table with him calling ‘Get back here, you little schweinhund, you little sausage snatcher!’”
Ardelle, who had lightly clamped a hand over her mouth until that moment, suddenly laughed out loud. A big, delighted bark of a sound that sent her teeth skittering across the kitchen floor. Jonah forgot about being nervous and watched the teeth in surprise, then looked at his aunt, her mouth round and open and empty. Seeing the look on her face, he burst into laughter and they howled together until his back ached and his eyes spilled over with tears.
“Too much sugar when I was a girl,” Ardelle said when they finally recovered enough and she bent to fetch her dentures, rinse and pop them back in her mouth. “Your mom’s still got all of hers. Probably she’ll be buried with every one of her original teeth still in her head.”
“She lost one last winter,” Jonah said. He looked down and away, unsure of himself.
“Did she now?”
“Yeah,” Jonah said. “She fell on some ice and it broke. A front one, too. After that it turned all black and she had to have it pulled.”
“Well, it’s nothing to laugh at, though it’ll do.” Ardelle grinned at Jonah until he couldn’t help but do the same. Later he wondered why he had told her that about the dog, his mother’s tooth.
At the end of summer, Ardelle drove Jonah back to the train in Brandon. Already the trees were beginning to turn gold and red around the edges. There was a chill in the air, a current underneath the lingering warmth of the season. Together at the station, Jonah and Ardelle sat on a bench and waited. For a while neither of them said anything until she handed Jonah a lunch box filled with a jar of milk, four beef and mashed potato sandwiches, and a slab of lemon squares to eat on his trip back home.
“It doesn’t mean you don’t love your parents if you choose to believe in a little grace.” Into his hand Ardelle pressed a leaf of thin India paper that he recognized as having been torn from a Bible. On it a verse was circled, which she told him to remember for a time when he might need it. For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you, not to harm you, plans to give you a future and a hope, it said, on the page taken from Isaiah.
“I’ve set aside a bit of money over the years,” Ardelle said. “Enough to send you to Bible school in Caronport. If you don’t mind the train, you can come stay with me for holidays. The money’s yours, if you decide.”
After that they were quiet again, but Jonah had pocketed the words.
When he got home he hid the folded page under his mattress but carried the passage around with him in his thoughts.
“You’re wrong, you know,” Jonah said quietly to his father. He had been back home for nearly two months and his uncle’s land had produced a better crop than his father’s, giving them more money than they’d ever had. “You’re wrong about people.”
“You may think that now,” his father said. He stood up straight and squinted until his eyes were condescending slits. He tried to work something out of his teeth with his tongue and made wet, sucking noises. “But when you get a little older and you have some brains and brats of your own, you’ll see. Nothin’ here in this world’s worth living for. Just a few things worth dying over.”
When Jonah saw Hazel for the first time, it was one of those moments. Like when, a year later, they visited the West Coast on their honeymoon and Jonah knew he should have been born near the ocean instead of an island of dirt surrounded by wheat and flax.
Jonah had finished high school at Caronport and moved across campus for college classes at Briercrest where Hazel was a year ahead of him, but a year younger. Her parents lived in Regina and had forgotten everything they ever knew about farming.
At first Jonah couldn’t get Hazel to notice him. In the cafeteria, although he chose his seat so she couldn’t help but see him, she usually immersed herself in a book while forking up bites of mashed potatoes, of which she always took twice as much as anyone else. He watched as other young men offered to fetch her dessert: vanilla ice cream with stewed plums. Those who were in seminary and encouraged to have a wife before entering the ministry, would sometimes sit across from her and thoughtfully open their Bibles on the table, reading as though in deep contemplation of the mysteries. Hazel wasn’t the most beautiful girl on campus, but what beauty she had was knit together with a quick wit and steady peace that attracted Jonah and the others to her like mice to a sack of grain.
When Hazel would glance up from her book to see who’d sat down across from her, and when one of the young men would gather the courage to start a conversation in hopes it might lead towards sitting together at the next meal, she politely told them that she hadn’t come to Briercrest to get married. Which was funny, because it was well known that Briercrest was where good Mennonite girls went to find a husband.
One day Jonah brought her an extra plate of mashed potatoes. He set it on the table and slowly pushed it towards her. Looking up from her book she laughed, a self-conscious snort that acknowledged her own ridiculousness. The two of them stayed and talked unti
l the cafeteria matron stood at the door and jangled her key ring. Hazel told Jonah that she walked with the Lord, and Briercrest was where she had followed Him. “Yeesh — that must really make me sound like a barrel of fun!”
“Barrel of potatoes, maybe.”
All through the rest of the school year Jonah was late to his first class of the morning, too busy trying to accidentally bump into Hazel on the way to hers. Sometimes she’d wave, other times she didn’t see him. What began to seem plain to Jonah was that she wasn’t looking. But when he noticed her in the stands one afternoon when his curling team was on the ice sheet in the old airplane hangar, he became certain that God had caused her to attend Briercrest just to meet him. Not long after, they became engaged. Jonah was twenty years old, ready to claim his uncle’s house and land.
The house that once belonged to Jonah’s uncle was visible from Jonah’s old bedroom window in his parents’ house. On top of a low hill, the structure sat higher than theirs, and Jonah had often imagined how he’d grow up to raise a different sort of family there. A family that laughed together often. There would be pictures of grandparents — his wife’s parents — on the mantel above the fireplace. They’d empty loose change from their pockets into a dish by the front door to spend on ice cream, instead of locked away in a metal box kept under the wood stove, with a mouse trap set on top. In the house on the hill, the pantry would always be lined with glass jars full of plums.
When Jonah and Hazel first arrived, Jonah stood on his porch and looked down their hill, wild with grasses, towards his parents’ house that was surrounded by a yard of compact dirt and strewn with orderly accumulations of broken down machinery.
Jonah’s father looked over Hazel for the first time as she stood next to Jonah in their front door, twisting the thin gold ring on her finger. She was dressed in a pair of jeans and, because she hadn’t been expecting company and it was a hot day in July, a blouse that was unbuttoned halfway from the bottom and tied into a knot. Her dark hair swung freely across her face.
Mennonites Don't Dance Page 2
