Mennonites Don't Dance

by Darcie Friesen Hossack

  “As if you’d ever let me forget,” she said. Instead of rendering the fatty pork down to kernels of meat, she had started the contents of the pan on fire. There was still a singe mark on the wall behind the stove.

  “And the cream gravy. I’ve seen fewer lumps in tapioca pudding.”

  “Haw haw. Very funny.”

  Later, when John went off to finish chores, Lizbeth returned to the house in an uncharacteristically helpful mood. There were bed sheets and the girls’ slips to be washed. And her mother wanted to show her how to use the new-to-them wringer-washing machine, bought off the trading post.

  “Heard you had yourself a little adventure,” her mother said. She reached out and tucked a curl of hair behind Lizbeth’s ear. “Now why don’t we see whether you can master something you actually need to know. Be careful, the wringer will grab your arm as easily as it does a sleeve.”

  Once the linens had gone through the sloshing cycle, Lizbeth helped guide the heavy, sopping fabric through the rollers. Grey rinse water sluiced back into the basin to be used as wash water for the next load. As Lizbeth watched, her mind wandered and she forgot to be cautious, nearly getting her fingers caught. Her mother snatched them away and the sheet Lizbeth was about to guide through fell to the floor with a solid, wet thump.

  Lizbeth was pretty certain her mother didn’t know how to use a chair. Her skirt barely brushed the seat before she popped up like a piece of toast. Even when the entire family gathered around the table for breakfast, she always thought of “just one more thing” that needed doing. The brown sugar was missing from the table, or she had to to punch the bread dough down so it could rise again and be baked before lunch.

  The other women from their village clucked with approval, maybe a little envy, and said things like, “Our Mrs. Klassen works like a whole dam full of beavers.” Lizbeth thought they said dam with a little extra oomph. Probably because it wasn’t possible for them to say the same syllable if it had a silent ‘n’ in it. Saying dam with an ‘n’ was tantamount to dropping a match in a pool of gasoline. You couldn’t buy enough fire insurance for too many damns.

  It was no wonder that her mother could never sit still. With Matthew still coming home to eat, she baked her way through a thousand pounds of flour a year, ground from their own grain. That was probably enough to feed one of the small mission countries they always got reports from in church. The reports came with a peg board of pictures, and Lizbeth remembered one photograph of a little black boy, looking pleased as peas, holding the severed heads of two grown men. One in each hand, by the hair. After that, Lizbeth figured the missionaries over there could probably use all the grain they could get, to keep the natives from getting hungry. She volunteered to send hers, because after the thousand pounds for the family, most of the rest of the harvest had to be sold to the farm co-op — where Mennonite wheat mixed with everyone else’s, unlike themselves. Lizbeth’s parents also set some aside to help poorer local families, or ones whose crops, for whatever reason, hadn’t been good that year. They grew enough potatoes, too, that the kids joked about how they could end world hunger if they gave away the contents of their root cellar. Since the village was their whole world, Lizbeth didn’t think it was that far from the truth.

  “Come, Lizbeth. You can help me take these clothes back to the neighbours,” her mother said. As one of their deliberate acts of kindness, they’d spent part of the afternoon washing and wringing the neighbours’ clothes through their machine, and now the clean laundry needed to be returned next door and pinned on a sagging clothesline that spent more time as a perch for birds to shit from (it was okay to say shit but not damn, because anyone who kept cows knew that shit was just a fact of life).

  Lizbeth couldn’t stand their neighbours. The way they glanced over the fence as though any member of Lizbeth’s family might, at any moment, attack them with the gospel, pelt them with Bible verses. When, in fact, all they ever did was give them potatoes and get their hands filthy trying to help them with their disgusting washing. Potatoes and laundry, it appeared, were as good a way as any to the soul.

  Lizbeth didn’t see the point. Not when the Heindricks were supposedly Mennonites, too, which meant they should be just as equipped to climb heaven’s ladder as anyone else they knew. They should be able to fend for themselves. After all, it was their own fault they did things like keep guns and drink alcohol and that they never did anything kind for anyone. And as any Mennonite with half a wit knew, doing something bad at the same time as not doing something good meant you were moving in the wrong direction twice as fast.

  “Don’t we have enough of our own washing to do without having to muck around in theirs? Who knows where this has been,” Lizbeth said, picking up a stiffened brown sock that they’d missed. She knew the neighbours’ sons from school and, while she shared some of their finer views, that the village needed a movie theatre and a couple of stores, she wasn’t impressed with them one bit. If anything, they hated the village in a way that made her want to defend everything about it.

  The oldest of the Heindricks boys was named Luke and was John’s age. Everyone at school called him Lucifer to keep from mixing him up with Lizbeth’s third oldest brother. The other boy, Joel, was the same age as her. Both of the boys had dropped out after the sixth grade after Joel lost a hand in a freak threshing accident. Lizbeth thought it was just as well — not about the hand, of course. Just that more school for them would be like throwing pearls in the slop pail. Arithmetic wasn’t going to make them become less creepy, either. They prowled around their family’s five acres, shooting gophers in the face, laughing as though they’d done something clever.

  Lizbeth rolled her eyes and called them dummkopfs behind their backs, but the truth was, she was afraid of them.

  “I don’t even want to know what kind of blood that was on their overalls,” Lizbeth said, trying one last time to irritate her mother into letting her off the hook. “Probably all the gophers they ate for supper.”

  “Lizbeth, that’s enough. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but when we serve people with our hands, we serve them with our hearts. It can change them. And even if it doesn’t — ” She left the thought trailing and Lizbeth resisted the urge to tug and see if she could make it unravel.

  She sighed as profoundly as she could, picked up a heavy basket of still-damp clothes and followed her mother out of their house and into the yard towards the neighbours.

  “Been waitin’ on these,” Mrs. Heindricks said. She had come out of her house to meet them and closed the door behind her before Lizbeth or her mother could see inside. “Doesn’t seem to me that your fancy machine takes any less time than a washboard and a determined pair of hands. And Lord knows you’ve got enough hands over there.”

  Lizbeth wondered how her mother managed to look so genuine. She was sure her own face had the word YUCK written all over it.

  To Lizbeth’s horror, her mother said, “Mr. Klassen asked me to say that he can use some extra help with the seeding this year, if your boys would like the work.” Lizbeth pulled her head back, as though someone had grabbed her hair from behind. She screwed her eyebrows together, but her eyes widened in alarm when the two Heindricks boys suddenly came round the side of the house, startling her so that she nearly dropped her basket. One of them laughed, a cruel-sounding noise that came out his nose. He nudged his brother and said something Lizbeth couldn’t quite hear — about working her over. She blushed down to her toes and felt she wanted to put on a fourth layer of clothes. Seeing the boys, Lizbeth’s mother quickly stepped in front of her, and Lizbeth was surprised at how grateful, how safe she felt standing in that protective shadow.

  “I wish we could just leave them be,” Lizbeth said. It was a few days later and she and John had taken one of their mother’s rhubarb-and-crabapple pies next door, and they had accepted it without so much as a mutter of thanks. “If you ask me, they wouldn’t like it in heaven, anyway.”

  “It’s not up to us. And God doesn
’t play favourites, Lizzy.”

  “He does so. He loved Jacob and hated Esau,” she said with satisfaction.

  “Well, still, it’s not up to us to decide for someone else.” He nudged Lizbeth off-balance and smiled, so quickly that it looked as though something else, shadowy, had moved across his features. “I think you should be careful, though.” He was quiet for a moment, holding his thoughts. “Lizzy, listen to me, okay? God never said we have to trust our neighbours. Love is not the same thing as trust.”

  “Love is love and trust is trust. Got it,” Lizbeth said, snickering. Although a stone had dropped into the pit of her stomach.

  One day that summer, Lizbeth heard Lucifer and Joel talking over the fence to John, who was in the garden, weeding between the potato mounds.

  “Hey, so your family’s been so, um, kind and stuff, we decided we’d like to have a Bible study or something.”

  John stood up slowly and, after telling Lizbeth to stay put, walked towards them, but not all the way to the fence. Lizbeth pushed her fist into her stomach to stop it from flopping. Say no, she thought. But because they’d asked to hear about God, there was no way to refuse. After supper, John picked up his Bible, told their parents where he was going, and went out the door. When he came back an hour later, he looked bleached, as though someone had pulled a plug and let all his blood drain.

  “What happened over there?” Lizbeth said. She took his Bible from him, set it on the kitchen table and pulled out a chair for him.

  “I want you to promise me to stay as far away from them as you can,” he said.

  “Okay. But what happened? You’re scaring me.”

  John didn’t answer.

  “I’m going to get Dad.” Lizbeth turned to go, but John stopped her.

  “Promise first,” he said.

  “I promise.”

  After they talked to John, their parents called together the whole family.

  “From now on, none of you are to go near any one of those people by yourselves. And never into their house, under any circumstances. That includes your mother,” Lizbeth’s father said.

  “What did they do?” Matthew said, always the most protective of the brothers. He leaned forward in his seat, searching John’s face for an answer. John was looking down at his hands. His whole body was shaking.

  “This is not to go farther than this house,” Lizbeth’s father said. He told them how when John went to the neighbours’, the Heindricks boys had set up a game for him. “Bible roulette,” they called it. One of them produced a hunting rifle and aimed it at John.

  “I wouldn’t get any answers wrong if I were you,” the one with the rifle had said. And when John stumbled over the begats, he shot a hole in their own house, right next to John’s head.

  “Can’t you call the police?” Lizbeth said. “They can take them to jail and we’ll never have to worry.”

  “We called,” her mother said, her voice unsteady.

  “And?”

  “The boy’s parents convinced them it was an accident. They took them to town, anyway, but will probably be released before long.”

  “Shouldn’t we tell the rest of the village?” Matthew said.

  “Right. And the pastor and elders. Have them driven out!” Lizbeth said.

  “For now, no,” their father said. “The boys threatened John not to tell anyone. I think the best thing is to pray, ask God to change their hearts.”

  John began to lose weight after his ordeal next door. His confident, teasing way also changed, became an effort, something Lizbeth thought he only did to keep her from noticing the dark smudges under his eyes.

  Over the next several weeks, because nothing else happened, just the occasional leering gesture over the fence, things gradually slipped back into a tense version of normal. In the fall, during the days, Lucifer and Joel disappeared into the far corner of their family’s acres to shoot, or were heard gunning their rusty old truck down the gravel road towards town. They’d come back, a day or two later, and Lizbeth would hear their rough laughter through the open window of her mother’s kitchen.

  But when their truck broke down at the beginning of winter, the tension between John and the two boys worsened. Sometimes she heard them shout taunts as John pulled up the tractor to plough snow from the driveway. Their voices were harsh, like the sound of heavy canvas being torn.

  “Hey, Bible Boy!” they’d say. Once, from the kitchen window, Lizbeth saw them point their shotgun at him, Joel propping the barrel on the stump of his wrist. “Why don’t you come on over here and see if you can save us.”

  Lizbeth had flown out of the house into the cold, but it was already over and John walked back with her, making her promise again to stay away from them.

  That night, Lizbeth sunk down on her knees in front of her bed. She fumbled with the soft rag rug she always kept by her feet, pushing it to the side until she knelt directly on the wood floor. On either side of her, her sisters were already asleep and snoring. Lizbeth began to pray.

  She prayed again the next night, and the next. All winter.

  By spring though, Lizbeth was distracted from her prayers when Liam Rempel, who was in her grade, started stealing looks at her in class when his teacher-father wasn’t looking. And on the morning that everything changed forever, there was no prickle at the back of her neck to make her think anything might be particularly wrong. No flutter of angel’s wings in the corner of Lizbeth’s vision, which her Sunday school teacher once said had warned him away from a mad dog. She hadn’t noticed any tension in the air. Rather, white Saskatoon-berry flowers had bloomed overnight and made the landscape look covered up with cleanliness.

  “Hey, Lizzy,” John said when Lizbeth left the house that morning, carrying several of her mother’s fresh rollkuchen wrapped in a tea towel. She’d snuck them when her mother wasn’t looking, and they were still warm and smelled pleasantly greasy. “Those for me?”

  “Um, no,” she said, teasing. “You can have all the ones I made. Better be quick though, before Mom gives them to the pigs.”

  Lizbeth kept walking and willed John not to follow her or ask any more questions. The rollkuchen were for Liam. And for once, Lizbeth had stopped wondering what else there was in the world. Rollkuchen and a Rempel was about as Mennonite as things could get, but Liam had a knack for getting into and out of mild trouble. Like the time he left a firecracker on the wood-heating stove at school, and when it went off, stood up and soon had the class laughing with a short lesson on pacifism. Imagining a life with him made Lizbeth think that life in the village might have some potential, after all.

  Lizbeth met Liam at the disused railroad tracks that ran behind an overgrown row of wild chokecherries at the back of their property. The same bushes that Lizbeth, with her mother and sisters, picked from every September for syrup and jelly.

  Lizbeth and Liam walked together, at first only holding hands. It was enough to make Lizbeth feel as though her heart, which was thumping like a twitterpated rabbit, would suddenly stutter to a stop from happiness. And she was sure she’d die from guilt and joy when, Liam, humming a melody, swept her around and began to show her how to waltz.

  “Hey, you’re pretty good,” Liam said. “You do know this is the Devil’s footwork, don’t you?”

  Lizbeth’s ears became hot. “Yeah, well.”

  “You know why Mennonites don’t dance, don’t you?”

  “Uh-uh,” Lizbeth said, mentally kicking herself for having nothing clever to say.

  “I heard my mom whispering it to a bunch of ladies once.”

  “Yeah, okay. So tell me already.”

  “Mennonites don’t dance because it might lead to sex.” He twirled her around and when she spun to face him, she saw that his face was as red as hers. “I can’t believe I said that.” He stopped and stared down at his feet. “Sorry.”

  “Um. It’s okay.” Lizbeth pushed her toes through the dirt. Secretly, she was already planning to re-live the moment in her imagination, t
urning it over and over and savouring it like a lozenge. So when the first shot rang out, Lizbeth stupidly thought it meant they’d been caught.

  “Probably just a fox near the henhouse,” Liam said. When they heard the second shot, followed by a woman’s scream, Lizbeth’s heart became a plug in her chest. Liam grabbed her hand and pulled her towards her house. She stumbled, and couldn’t move except to clutch her arms and bend forward. Her hair, which she had let down so Liam could see it looking soft and loose, fell in front of her shoulders and hid her face.

  “No-no-no-no-no.” The moan seeped from her like air from a tire.

  “Lizzy,” Liam said. But hearing John’s pet name for her in Liam’s mouth only made her feel the need to retch. No one else called her Lizzy.

  “Lizzy. C’mon. We have to go.” When Lizbeth tried to run, she couldn’t make her legs obey. They felt like dough and moved in all the wrong ways.

  Liam stopped to look into Lizbeth’s face before he turned and ran towards the sound of the shot. Alone on the crumbling tracks, Lizbeth watched him disappear.

  Afterwards, Lizbeth would not remember how she got back to the house but, when she caught up with Liam, he was kneeling in her parent’s garden, cradling John’s body. The front of Liam’s shirt was soaked through and sticking to his chest with her brother’s blood, which had stopped pouring from a hole in his neck. Her mother had run back to the house to call for help that was already too late.

  “He asked for you,” Liam said, his head bowed. “When I got here, he said your name.”

  Lizbeth stood, stiff and still, her legs rooted to where she had stopped. Her mother and sisters came running from the house, and she watched them as though they weren’t real. Her father and brothers, who heard the shot from a nearby field they’d been working, came next. One by one, they knelt around John, reaching out for his and each other’s hands, and wept. Their father, his voice breaking on every word, began to pray. For strength to bear this loss, and for the souls of the boys who had killed their son and brother. Lizbeth didn’t kneel with them and didn’t bow her head. She continued to stand and kept her eyes open and fixed on John.