Mennonites Don't Dance

by Darcie Friesen Hossack

  “Hey there, kiddo,” he said, looking at the way she was touching a pig with just the tips of her fingers. She gave the carcass, with its scooped-out belly and bristly pink skin, a big shove to show that it didn’t bother her.

  “I have to get these bags into the ice house before they melt,” she said, hoping Clive would let her go on her way without saying anything else.

  “You’ve let most of it melt already.” He wiped his bloodied hands on the front of his apron and blocked Ani’s way. Ani stood up a little straighter, although she wished she could back down and leave. She wished, also, that her mother, who was busy with customers at the front of the shop, would come and interrupt them. Clive was careful around her, though, and if he did say something mean, he did it in a joking way that could be mistaken for being friendly. In fact, half of the time Ani couldn’t tell, either.

  “You know, Caroline used to do your job, and she was happy to help out,” he said. “She didn’t think she was too good to do it.”

  “As long as I pack the ice, does it matter if I’m happy about it?” she said, holding his gaze.

  “Well, I guess that’s the difference between you two. She didn’t mind getting her hands a little dirty. You could learn a thing or two from her.” He took one of Ani’s hands and rubbed the blood from his own hands into it, mashing gritty bits of fat between her fingers.

  Ani stiffened. When she spoke, her voice wavered.

  “Can I ask you something?” Ani said. Whatever courage she had a moment ago had already drained away, but she went on anyway. “Wouldn’t the ice house stay frozen even if the power went out? Even if it was left overnight? There was no reason we had to come live here, was there? You just didn’t want to change anything for me.”

  “You think you have everything all figured out, don’t you?” Clive said. He grinned and his eyes crinkled at the corners, as though they were playing a game and Ani had just made a bad move.

  Ani gave the cart a push and Clive let her pass. In a few moments she opened the door to the ice house and disappeared inside. She breathed in the cold, crisp air until she felt calmer. Unlike in the rest of the shop, where the smell of meat was heavy and sickening, here the smells were absorbed in the ice.

  Despite the cold, Ani worked slowly at stacking the bags she’d packed, laying down a row and placing the next bags on top in the grooves in between. Her mother always said she was proud of Ani’s neat rows. It was, Ani thought, a silly thing to be proud of.

  With the last bag in place, Ani was about to turn the cart around and push it back through the alleys of lockers towards the door, when the lights went out. There was a moment before it became completely dark. The light seemed suspended, as though taking a breath. Then it was gone. And it was quiet.

  Ani heard her heartbeat quicken, her clothes rasp as she turned suddenly and bumped into the cart.

  When she reached out to find something to hold onto, the tips of her frost-burnt fingers bumped into the nearest wall of meat lockers. Blindly, she touched the wood, fingering the hinges and locks that were pitted with rust. As Ani felt her way in the direction she thought the door was, she began to shiver. She tried to focus on her hands moving along the lockers, placing her feet one in front of the other. Except for what she could touch, the room had disappeared, and so had her memory of how to find the way out. Blood beat against her eardrums as she groped along the lockers and came to a dead end in the maze. There, she pressed her back into the wall and hung her head. She slid down to sit on her heels, feeling icy, metal latches scrape through her clothes and cut her skin. She listened to the silence, focused on the darkness.

  Now, ten years later, the ice house’s motors have gone silent for good. Not even the drone of outside traffic penetrates the thick layers of insulation.

  “Ani,” her mother says, startling her. For a moment, Ani is still that young girl. She’s trapped and her mother has finally come to find her and show her the way out. She shivers, then remembers that the room is uncomfortably warm and the entire building will soon be torn down.

  “What were you thinking about just now?” her mother says, but doesn’t leave a space for Ani to answer. “You have to come have a look at what I found up front.”

  “I got lost in here once. The lights went off,” Ani says.

  For a moment her mother looks startled. Her voice is forcibly bright. “No, I don’t think so, honey. I would have known about that. Or Clive would have known and said something. One of us would have found you. Your stepfather always sensed when something was wrong.” She takes Ani’s hand and holds it tightly, but doesn’t look at her. Then she turns around and walks away, leaving Ani to follow her out of the ice house to the front of the shop.

  When the lights finally came back on that day in the ice house, Ani tried to get up and run to the door. She had no reason to think her mother would be there waiting for her on the other side, but was sure of it, anyway.

  Ani was too cold to run, and stumbled clumsily, using the lockers for balance. When she got to the door, she threw it open and plunged into the hallway. Her lungs stung with the warm air.

  But instead of her mother, she tripped into one of the pigs hanging from the ceiling and set it dancing like a grotesque ballerina. She fell backwards onto the cement floor. Ani was sure there hadn’t been a pig that close to the door when she went in.

  “I got lost in there once,” Ani says to herself. She knows if her mother doesn’t believe she was ever trapped, she would never believe that when Ani looked up from where she fell, she saw Clive there, his arms folded, watching her.

  “Did it start to thaw in there?” he asked.

  “Look. See, it’s as though he left it for you,” Ani’s mother says when Ani catches up with her at the front of the shop. Her voice is high and hopeful as she reaches into the glass-fronted deli showcase, stinking now of rancid fat and ancient cheese. She takes out a glass bottle.

  “Strawberry cream soda,” her mother says, although the candy-pink liquid doesn’t need explanation. After that first Christmas, before Clive married her mother, he used to buy them for Ani. Before, but not after. “Clive knew it was your favourite. Take it. It’s still good.”

  “It smells like old meat,” Ani says.

  “That’s just on the outside. Here, we’ll wash it up at home. We have a bottle opener. Maybe you and Clive can share it, for old times or something.”

  “Mom, please listen to me. I don’t want it.”

  “Oh, well, I’ll carry it for you, then.” She slips the bottle into her purse.

  “I guess we never thought this place would be torn down, did we?” Ani’s mother says, although it’s not really a question. “I know your stepfather certainly didn’t. He thought our grandchildren would visit us here. All of our grandchildren, not just Caroline’s children.”

  “It’s not much of a place for kids,” Ani says.

  “No, maybe not.”

  “The dead pigs were pretty creepy,” Ani says with a little laugh. There had also been cows, headless lambs with wool socks and, once, a calf’s heart that Ani found on the butchering table next to the saws and grinders, still faintly beating where Clive left it.

  Both curious and repelled, Ani reached out to touch the purple, fatted muscle. The heart had latched onto Ani’s hand, startling her. She wanted to pull her hand back, but her finger slipped into the aorta and the heart suckled it for a few desperate gulps before it finally fell still.

  For what seemed like a long time, Ani stood there, unable to pull away. Until Clive found her and said, “Those things’ll latch onto anything.”

  Ani regrets coming for this last look around the old butcher shop with her mother. At first it had seemed like the right thing to do, like visiting a relative in hospital, making peace before they pull the plug.

  “You should come see inside the place one more time, don’t you think?” her mother had suggested on the phone, pleased when Ani agreed. “And tell that fiancé of yours to come, too. Before y
ou two get married, he should see where you grew up.”

  When it came time, Ani had left Joshua at her mother and Clive’s rented house, afraid he wouldn’t be able to see beyond the butcher shop’s now-empty rooms. That what had taken place in them would be invisible to him, like it was to the customers who’d once stood on the other side of the meat case, waiting their turn to be served. They preferred to think the steaks and roasts, the smoked and processed meats they took home in neat paper packages, hadn’t been cut from the carcasses of dead animals dangling out of sight in the back hall.

  “I think we’ll have a look upstairs, too, won’t we,” Ani’s mother asks, seeming disappointed that the cream soda was not the find she expected it to be. “I’m sure you want to have a look at your old room again before it’s gone.”

  Together they climb the creaking wooden stairs attached to the outside of the building and let themselves into the apartment with their old key, which still works in the lock.

  “It hasn’t changed,” Ani says when they step inside.

  “Did Clive tell you people from town are asking about the old bricks once the building comes down? They want them for fireplaces. It’s a nice idea, don’t you think?” She waits for Ani to agree.

  “I don’t know. It seems strange, I guess.”

  “Well, I think it makes Clive feel better to know that parts of the old place will live on. It might even be nice if you and Joshua ask him to put some aside for you. For when you build your own home.”

  “Mom. Really. You should know there’s nothing here I want to take with me,” Ani says.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” she says, leading Ani into her old bedroom — Caroline’s old bedroom.

  “We must have had some happy times here together though, didn’t we? I hope you haven’t told Joshua that there was nothing good about living here.”

  “I haven’t said much of anything,” Ani says.

  “Well, I hope you told him about that Christmas before we were married, how Clive came over to our house with that silly turkey that you two laughed over for weeks afterwards. Honestly, I don’t know what happened to you two later on. You seemed to get along so well, and suddenly you became so cold towards him. Why was that?”

  “It wasn’t sudden, Mom,” Ani says, feeling tired. The sound of the ice house’s motors has followed her to college and she still doesn’t sleep well at night.

  “Well, whatever it was, I know Clive was always sorry you two weren’t closer. Especially after you seemed happy about us becoming a family.”

  “It didn’t turn out the way I expected.”

  “Well,” her mother says. She’s biting her lip and looking down at her feet. “I guess we don’t always get what we thought, but sometimes we still get what we asked for.”

  Ani is quiet for what seems like a long time. She reaches for a strip of the painted-over wallpaper that has begun to peel away from the wall.

  “I didn’t ask for this,” she says and hands her mother the paper.

  “This was Caroline’s wallpaper, her room. It was never mine.”

  “Of course it was yours. And I had to cook in his wife’s kitchen and sleep in her bed. But I made them mine.” She turns away from Ani and walks into a corner, and Ani suddenly understands that her mother’s been backed into one all these years. In one hand her mother is holding the piece of wallpaper. Her other hand is empty.

  Ani looks at her mother and shakes her head.

  “Maybe we should pick up a treat for all of us on the way home,” Ani says, stepping aside to let her mother by.

  Her mother is quiet for a moment. “What a nice idea,” she says and gives the strip of torn wallpaper back to Ani.

  LITTLE LAMB

  MY BROTHER MAY SEEM STUPID. BUT really, Henry is just young. Not too young to know certain things, mind you. Like that we’re Mennonite. Which of course means we understand that farming and inventing new ways to be backwards is the only sure way into grace. For example, we’re the last farm within a hundred miles to go without a flush toilet, and that makes us makes us little closer to Heaven than any of our neighbours.

  That’s the easy stuff to understand. The kind you just know because you’re born to it and it’s talked about all the time, at breakfast, dinner, and supper and every moment that it can be crammed in between. Then there’s the stuff a kid can’t know until he’s learned it for himself.

  Take, for example, the Sears catalogue. It’s Dad’s until he gives it to Mom. She tears out pages with pictures of practical things and saves them in case she’s allowed to make an order. And when she isn’t, she uses them to line the kitchen drawers. That way, to get rid of all the mouse droppings that collect there overnight, all a kid has to do is crumple up the liner.

  Usually the pages in the drawers picture things like grey wool socks, like the ones that get shredded inside our field boots by a mealy mixture of shattered hay and mud, churned with sweat that turns to mortar. A sock can still be saved if you know how to work a darning needle. So there’s no cause to be hasty ordering fresh ones.

  On the other hand, a new pair every other Christmas would be swell.

  Dad tears out all the pages with dirty pictures, too; the ones with women in bras and girdles. I know he does this because he thinks we’ll sin with them while doing our business in the old outshed. As though anyone would want to be in that damp, creaky, reeking upright coffin a half-second longer than we have to.

  After Mom and Dad have had their way with the catalogue, then it’s ours, and what’s left is a picture book of things we can’t have. Things Dad doesn’t think any kids of his could ever want. He’s too thick between the ears to know that those are the pages that tempt us the most. Henry is only eight years old and he couldn’t care less about women’s torsos in white cotton scaffolding. The only women he knows are Mom and the one-and-only teacher at our dumb country school, and neither of them have anything under their dresses that any of us want to see.

  When we got the last winter catalogue, reminding us that it was now 1954 in the parts of the world that weren’t Mennonite country, Henry was bent on getting a sled. Pretty unoriginal of him, if you ask me, since each of us boys wanted one at one time or another. When it was me, I even offered to do extra chores. I got the chores, all right. But never saw a sled. Lesson learned.

  Henry figured it out too, when in place of a sled he inherited a pair of ice skates with the slackest boot leather you’ve ever seen. They’d already been worn by three cousins and our other two brothers. With no support, his ankles fells inwards and ached. It was colder than a witch’s tit that day, too (I learned that saying at recess from Erich Wiens, who everyone knows is going straight to hell). When my brother tried to skate on the frozen slough that he trudged a whole mile from the house to get to, the ice was too cold to melt under the blunt blades and all he managed to do was shuffle from end to end, his feet growing cold, then dangerously hot, then numb. He had to walk all the way home in the deep snow and by the time he got back was howling like we’d stuck him in the meat grinder. He blubbered even more when Mom dunked his feet in a bowl of warm water and rubbed his toes, which had gone white. But he stopped pretty quick when Dad came in and gave him the biggest bawling out of his life for being such a little wiener. None of his toes even fell off.

  After that Henry didn’t want to play outside at all and it no longer mattered that he didn’t have a sled. He tore out the page with its picture, crammed it in his pocket, and snuck it into the outhouse with him. Exactly the way Dad worried we would if he slipped up and gave us a chance to go in there with the girdled ladies.

  Of course I didn’t see what Henry did in there, but I know. Same thing I did with a picture of a hockey stick once: crumpled the paper to soften it a little before sending it to a more fitting end.

  Unlike the rest of the chores we have to do, Henry actually enjoys shovelling out the concrete shit-trenches after the cows have been milked. He replaces their soiled bedding with new hay. And I�
��ll give it to him that it really is the better of the chores in any season. Although it’s also a trap.

  Henry’s always been soft towards all the newborn animals on the farm, whether they’re meant for the slaughterhouse or not. Calves and chicks. Mangy puppies. Even the mice we poison and the gophers we bury alive in their holes.

  Dad say there’s no place on a farm for softness.

  Yet, ever since the birth of a late lamb this year, Henry has stolen time from kneeling on the concrete floor in our basement bedroom and repenting of his sinful nature. Instead, he hurries through mucking out the rest of the barn and leaves the lamb’s stall to the last.

  I know Henry thinks I’m just like Dad. But I know the chilling warmth Henry feels when the lamb sucks on his fingers, eager for salt. I know, too, how my brother slides down to sit on his heels to watch the lamb as it plays, all innocent and forgetful that it’s just living meat.

  They’re all the same, lambs. Sure, every animal born on the farm is cute and whatever, until they get the axe or, like unwanted kittens, drowned in the rain barrel. A lamb’s only hope is if it grows up, produces some offspring of its own — before it gets the hatchet.

  Henry’s lamb is no exception. It has spindly, elastic legs and is all pathetically adorable when it bounds around the stall, or nips at its mother’s tail, or climbs up her shifting mound of wool. Henry laughs when it does that. He pinches his nose to keep quiet as the lamb teeters onto its mother’s head and either falls or jumps into the fresh nest of hay. It nurses, then sleeps, and Henry comes to the house for supper at exactly five o’clock.

  But Henry has made a mistake today. He didn’t show up for supper. And although it was only a matter of time until he slipped up, now he’ll have to learn that mistakes never go unrewarded around here.

  I’m the first to find him in the lamb’s stall. He doesn’t wake up until I roughly rock him with my boot. “Hey, Mary, wake up.”