by Tamar Myers
Last, but not least, was the fact that two of Chief Toy’s suspects, Agnes and Doc, were innocent. I would have been willing to bet the farm on that – literally – except that we Mennonites don’t bet as a matter of religious conviction. As it just so happened, those two innocent people were my very best friends. Perhaps I could clear their names on my own, thus saving them the humiliating journey through Hernia’s gossip mill. Although the truth was on my side, in this country we believe that justice is blind which, of course, makes as much sense as having a guide dog that is blind. Therefore it was I, Magdalena Portulacca Yoder Rosen, riding to the rescue – in a police cruiser, red lights swirling and sirens wailing.
‘Flattery will get you everywhere,’ I practically yelled. ‘I accept your offer.’
From the corner of my right eye I saw Granny Yoder shake a bony finger at me, and then in another flurry of dust motes she vanished from my stuffy parlour.
THREE
‘What was that all about?’ my Dearly Beloved inquired delicately. To his credit, he’d been waiting patiently in the kitchen, along with our one-year-old son, Little Jacob, and Freni, my beloved kinswoman, who also happened to be our cook. I gave Gabriel points for patience, because I knew that he would have liked nothing better than to have stormed the parlour and thrown the ‘little whippersnapper Toy’ out on his ear.
‘It was about the English woman, ya?’ Freni said, hazarding a guess. To the Amish, anyone from the outside world is ‘English.’ The reason for this is because the Amish immigrated to America from Switzerland as a group in the early 1700s when England ruled the land. The Amish were an insular faith, keeping to themselves as much as they could. To them the outside world was English, and it remained so, even after the United States declared its independence in 1776. Hence, Hispanic Americans are considered English by the Amish, because they are not Amish, whereas an Englishwoman from England, who adopted the Amish faith, would no longer be English. Go figure. Thus the word English is used as a religious classification rather than a national one. To a woman like Freni, the expression ‘English English’ might well refer to a Roman Catholic from London.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He needs my help in catching that horrible woman’s killer.’
‘Now, darling,’ said the Babester (as I am wont to call my husband in the privacy of my mind), ‘it isn’t nice to speak ill of the dead. Or is that just a Jewish custom?’
‘We Christians don’t do it either,’ I said, ‘but because of all the unflattering things she said about your mother in that trashy novel of hers, your mother’s name tops Chief Toy’s list of murder suspects.’
At that the Babester bellowed like our prize-winning bull Lester did when our cow, Daisy, accidently kicked those particular blue ribbon features of his that made him a breeding champion. After that, Lester was forced into early retirement and Daisy had to be freshened at a neighbor’s farm.
‘My mother!’ Gabe exclaimed. ‘I can’t believe you dragged my mother into this.’
‘It wasn’t me—’ Quite possibly I would have carried on as loudly as Gabriel, had not I spied Freni’s pitiful attempt to waggle her almost non-existent brows above a pair of rimless glasses. In this code, one perfected by eons of time, across countless cultures, she was trying to warn me about the perils of coming between a man and his mother. The dear woman knew that Gabriel and Mother Malaise shared a bond so tight that one glue company even used their photo on advertisements. While some men have to sever their mother’s apron strings, Gabriel’s mother trotted over from a pseudo-convent every evening to cut his meat for him. I use the word ‘pseudo’ because she made up her own religion, ordained herself as its head, and this so-called Convent of the Sisters of Perpetual Apathy is an old farmhouse that once belonged to my inadvertent first husband. Mother Malaise’s misguided followers are a bunch of loonies in search of their tunes. Enough said – for now.
‘Ach!’ said Freni, recoiling as much as a woman can when she lacks any semblance of a neck. ‘What you say is not fair to our skinny Magdalena. Your mama – this Mother Mayonnaise – she has plenty of meat on her bones, and she cannot be dragged by anyone.’
‘It is all right, Freni,’ I said. ‘He didn’t mean it literally.’
‘Yah? Is that so?’ Thankfully she didn’t wait for an answer, but turned back to her stew pot, muttering all the time.
‘Got to love her,’ I said. ‘She’s my mother by a different womb.’
For the next few minutes Freni wisely stirred the stew while my Babester stewed. Meanwhile, the newest love of my life, the male whose apron strings I would never allow to be severed, clung to a stool across the kitchen and stared intently at me. In retrospect, I have no doubt that he was sending me a coded message as well, because without any warning he lunged forward and began lurching in my direction. This was only the third time that the little rug rat had ever attempted to walk on his own.
Needless to say, my arguably stunted heart threatened to burst with joy. Since nothing can compare to watching the fruit of one’s womb perform amazing deeds, I actually felt a moment of solidarity with the erstwhile maligned Mother Mayonnaise – I mean, Malaise! Alas, my moment of charity lasted just as long as Little Jacob kept his balance. After five weaving steps he plopped on his rump, but instead of crying like I’d fully expected him to, he laughed and held up fat little arms. His little fists opened and closed as if to say, Pick me up. Set me on my feet. I want to do it again!
I am known for my quick, hawk-like reactions. I would go so far as to say that I am proud of my ability to respond quickly, and appropriately, in any given situation, but we Mennonites believe that pride is a grave sin. Instead, we have been raised to be proud of our humility. Some folks find this conundrum harder to live with than others do.
At any rate, my Dearly Beloved’s swift actions were not quite as swift as those of yours truly – not by a long shot. The pouty look that his delicious, bow-shaped lips assumed was reminiscent of the time when my mother-in-law forgot to cut his Jell-O pudding for him, as well as his meat. Instinctively, if not from valuable experience, I knew that a man bested at a lunging sport – especially one played in the presence of another woman – was bound to be cranky and uncooperative for the rest of the day. The fact that the other woman was his mother’s age, height, and build (inverted isosceles triangle) made no difference in a positive way.
‘Oh, is my Jakey-wakey-snoogey-boogey looking for his Daddy-waddy?’ I cooed as I scooped him up.
‘Mags, stop it! We agreed on no baby talk.’
I breathed deeply of heaven’s perfume – that is to say, a baby’s head – and instantly defused the old grouch by depositing chubby Little Jacob into his father’s strong, tanned arms. Suddenly, I felt totally at peace as well. In my book, there is nothing sexier than a father tenderly holding his child.
‘Ach, you English mitt der funny names,’ Freni said. She sounded almost disappointed that we’d stopped arguing. Admittedly, for someone like Freni who doesn’t watch TV, from time to time the Babester and I do make for good entertainment.
‘Not to worry, Freni,’ I said. ‘When he sees me decked out in my uniform, climbing into my black and white police car, he’ll have kittens.’
I would like to think that Freni winked then. After all, it is hard to tell, given that the lenses in her glasses are a quarter of an inch thick. But if I were to be brutally honest with myself, I might admit that she looked just as shocked as my Dr Gabriel Rosen, the handsome cardiologist to whom I had promised to be faithful until death us did part. Fortunately, it was Gabe, the outsider from New York, who had insisted that we leave the word ‘obey’ out of our vows.
The Convent of the Sisters of Perpetual Apathy lay across Hertzler Road from the PennDutch Inn, about a quarter of a mile away. In the old days both properties were farms, operated by second cousins, third cousins, fourth cousins and fifth cousins, who also happened to be first cousins. The two men I’m referring to were my papa and Aaron Miller Sr, but trust me
: their close blood ties were not unusual in our community, where family trees give way to thickets which can prove daunting to the casual genealogist. The reason for this is that the Amish marry exclusively within their community. As a result, even I, who am merely a Mennonite of Amish descent, am in fact my own cousin. Just hand me a sandwich and I constitute a family picnic.
Now where was I? Oh, yes, I was going across Hertzler Road (the Hertzlers are cousins as well) to what had once been a productive dairy farm. Then Aaron Sr died, Aaron Jr lied, and I cried. That said, after the marriage that wasn’t, and I was branded forever as an inadvertent adulteress, the hunk without a heart sold the family inheritance to the mother of my current lover. There, I said it, if only in my mind! Yes, we are married, but the Babester and I are lovers just the same. Lover – what a sinfully sensuous word, something only an English would dare speak aloud. If Mama could hear me she’d spin so fast in her grave she’d generate enough electricity to supply all Hernia’s needs into the middle of the twenty-second century.
I shouted it instead. ‘Lover! Gabriel Rosen is my lover!’
This was my anthem, which I continued to shout as I drove from my front porch to the convent gates. This was my right for having survived adolescence as the tall, awkward girl with the horsey face who never stood a chance of having a boyfriend, if only because Mama thought that deodorant was too English. As a consequence my nickname throughout high school was Yoder with an Odour. I had to console myself with the fact that I was not hirsute, because Mama believed that females who shaved and used depilatories were in cahoots with the Devil. She was not alone in her beliefs. Poor Agganetha Freisen spent her teenage years with the moniker Shaggy Aggie.
Rest assured that by the time I reached the gates of the so-called convent, I was safely ensconced in my police cruiser, with the windows up, and the sirens wailing like a banshee on the Scottish moors. Perhaps Mama didn’t hear me – based on my next electric bill – but the Mother Superior sure did. Mother Malaise, aka Ida Rosen, could hear a reference to her son texted from a bunker somewhere in wilds of North Korea. In short, my stout, ex-Jewish nemesis from Brooklyn, New York has Gabe-dar.
Call me remiss if I do not adequately describe the woman with the apron strings of steel. Rest assured that this is not judgment on my part, but merely a keen sense of observation. Although Ida is no relation to my much-adored cousin Freni, she shares her same top-heavy triangular figure. However, Ida’s ankles are matchstick thin, and her feet the size of a new born baby’s. It is above the triangle that the biggest differences are to be found: Ida has a neck. Granted, it is a stubby neck, but it is quite serviceable, allowing her oversized head to swivel a freakishly three hundred degrees by my calculations.
Yes, I have been known to exaggerate – just a tad – upon occasion, but Mother Malaise really did make one stop and consider the possibility that the woman might have owl blood coursing through her veins. Of course, it would have been a great sin on one or both of her parents’ parts for interbreeding – well, it isn’t my fault that my mind went there, is it? It was Mother Malaise who was to blame for wearing a dreary, greyish-brown habit with a wimple that sported two inexplicable tufts of fabric atop it like the ears of the Great Horned Owl. Like Freni, Mother Malaise required glasses, but hers were notable for their immense diameter rather than the thickness of their lenses.
So when my official police cruiser screeched to a halt in a spray of gravel and loose dirt, I was greeted by the visage of a Great Horned Owl flapping its wings and hooting – albeit something other than ‘who.’ That is to say, my mother-in-law has a vocabulary guaranteed to make even the most hardened Baptist blush. After a good deal of wasted time, when it appeared that she’d run out of breath and had been reduced to a heaving habit beneath the giant rotating head, I jumped smartly from the car. The one thing that Toy had failed to outfit me with was a gun, mayhap rightly so; nonetheless, I patted my empty holster for dramatic effect.
‘M-Magdalena,’ Mother Malaise gasped when she could produce the necessary wind, ‘this isn’t Halloween, you know. You could get arrested for impersonating a police officer, and you certainly will get arrested for stealing a police car. In fact, I’m making the call right now.’ She began fumbling within the yards and yards of coarse fabric that hung from her bodacious bosoms.
‘Stuff and nunsense,’ I said. ‘I am, in fact, the de facto investigator in the murder of Ramat Sreym, the nebbish novelist who plotzed in a pie.’
Ida yanked her fat, fumbling fingers out of her habit and pointed one at me. Given the meatiness of said digits, it looked like all five were aimed in my direction.
‘Vhat?’ she rasped. ‘I dun’t understand a verd you are saying, Magdalena. Not a verd, but eet eez lies, all lies.’
I patted my empty holster again, and displayed a little attitude in the way I cocked my bony left hip. ‘Hmm, if you ask me, this place is just begging for a few citations. When is the last time you’ve had your kitchen inspected? You have any illegals working here? How about you? Your accent sounds funny to me.’
My mother-in-law ripped off her wimple, and I could see that her face was the color of boiled rice. ‘It vas only one rat,’ she said. ‘A small von – OK, so maybe not so small. Who knew dat dey make business like chocolate sprinkle? You know dis ting, Magdalena? So vhen Sister Distemper put dis sprinkle on zee cake zat I bring over for my Gabeleh’s birzday—’
‘Stop!’ I shouted. ‘That cake was delicious.’
Her oversized face regained some color as she nodded her head vigorously. ‘Yah, like see cupcakes zat vee donated to zee school bake sale, no?’
‘No!’
‘Vaht you mean “no? ” You dun’t remember?’
‘Of course, you ninny – I mean, you nunny. Can I please come in, so that I can get to the purpose of my visit?’
‘Yah, sure. But first you tell me, did you see zat beautiful chocolate pie zat Sister Distemper enter in zee pie contest last veek? Such an artist, zat von!’
‘Pie, schmie,’ I said and swept past her. Then with all the authority bestowed upon me vis-à-vis the status of a pretend police woman, a counterfeit cop and an invertebrate investigator (I have been called spineless, mind you), I pushed through a pair of sagging wrought-iron gates and up the steps of the two-hundred-year-old wooden farmhouse.
There was no point in ringing the bell, as it had not been working for a dozen years. Knocking soon proved futile as well, so with Mother Superior, aka Mother Malaise, aka Ida Rosen, aka the Great Horned Owl, flapping at my rear, I merely opened the door and stepped into the empty main room. The farmhouse, otherwise known as the convent, had been added on to by the cult in a higgledy-piggledy fashion. Sister Disheartened, who had once been an architect, had eventually succeeded in connecting several outbuildings with the main house. It had been Mother Superior’s desire to have a space where apathetic postulates could wander listlessly about, contemplate their pupiks (Yiddish for navels), and perhaps occasionally even pray. The end result was a large courtyard with a whitewashed tractor tyre as its centerpiece. The tyre had originally been intended as a flower bed, but since no one had the energy or the inclination to plant real flowers, I’d taken it upon myself to stick some rather lovely silk flowers in it when I changed the old silk flowers from my parents’ graves last spring and replaced them with new ones.
Mother Superior, aka Mother Malaise, aka Ida Rosen, aka the mother-in-law not from Heaven soon caught up with me, and since the weather was pleasant we sat outside in the courtyard on a pair of rickety wooden folding chairs. I had a perfect view of the white tyre, and I was pleased to see that the good sisters had also lacked the oomph to remove the price tag on the bouquet from Mama’s grave. I usually remove Papa’s price tag, but Mama was so tight when it came to money that she could pinch a penny so that not only could it scream, it could sing a Lady Gaga song – in four-part harmony, no less. Once, when I was thirteen, and I needed fifty cents so I could buy you-know-what in an emergency situation
from that dispenser in the girls’ lavatory at school, she refused to let me have it; I had to sit on my book bag all the way home. So now I leave the tag on Mama’s bouquet just to make her spin a couple of times. Besides, given all the electricity that she generates, I see it as a way to reduce my carbon footprint – maybe even that of my entire family.
At any rate, no sooner had my bony butt hit the seat of that rickety chair than Ida was all over me like butter on popcorn. ‘Now vee talk,’ she said.
‘Yes, now you will talk. Ida, it is no secret that you found Ramat Sreym’s depiction of you in her book to be insulting.’
The massive head recoiled. ‘Vhat? Are you meshuggeneh? Zat voman vas a terrific vriter. Von of zee best, eef you ask me – like Tolstoy or Pushkin, mebbe.’
‘Uh—’
‘Vhat? You never hear of deez men?’
‘Yes, I hear of deez men – I mean, these men. Look, Ida, you moved here from Brooklyn two years ago, but sometimes your Yiddish accent is worse than when you arrived. Then, on other days, you have hardly any accent. How can this be?’
My nemesis shrugged and smiled just enough to display her gold tooth. Why had I even bothered to ask? Ida Rosen might be old, but she was far from helpless. Like every female, everywhere, she had been born knowing how to manipulate her father. (Surely this is the reason why the word ‘manipulate’ begins with the word man.) However, Ida had progressed to become a master manipulator, bar none, and her fluctuating accent was just one of her many tools. Unfortunately the Babester was her most frequent victim.
